Portra 800 has always been a film stock reserved for “Special Occasions”. Frugal shooting doesn’t often lend to nearly £20 for a roll of 36 shots, so when I do decide to shoot a roll it has to be for something I know will be worth it. Or at least think it it might be worth it.
I heard about a Light exhibition/ installation in London’s east end; various set ups of lasers/ strobes/ ambient music all installed in an old industrial building at The Beams. There were a few photography restrictions; no interchangeable lenses, no tripods so high ISO would be the name of the game if I was going to get any sort of usable images. Portra 800 pushed to 3200 seemed the only logical (if not misguided) option.
I had little experience pushing colour film, especially to such an extreme, but I hoped that with the sharp contrast and simple colours I was likely to get that I could correct any colour casts that I might encounter in the scans.
To my surprise I actually got some very usable images, especially in the “Main Event” room consisting of hundreds of red laser beams filling one large room.
For the day I was using a recently picked up Mamiya Super Deluxe F2 which turns out to be both a blessing and a curse. I think the vintage bloom around some of the highlights produced by this lens adds to the “Dreamy” aesthetic, and I was really impressed with how sharp the images turned out considering I had to shoot everything wide open. The downsides of using some of these older Japanese rangefinders is that it had a sticky shutter and ruined some of the shots. It seems like my fix of lighter fluid on the blades is only a temporary solution, just like I had read.
Overall I love the mood of these shots, the total wash of red in some shots compared with the stark reds vs. blacks. Something I hadn’t planned for is the pitch black silhouettes that aren’t obvious at first.
So do I think this experiment was successful? Absolutely, although next time I would make sure to use a more reliable camera, and maybe a faster lens to avoid having to rely on ultra slow shutter speeds handheld.
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