"new" to film photography : slide or negative?

[boldo]

I've already explained elsewhere why I'm "new" to using film instead of digital...

anyway :

being my primary objective having good scans of the best pictures made by a lab and then using the resultant files as the images produced by a digital camera, would you suggest negative or slide film?

I can suppose that scanning slide film can give better results than scanning negatives because of the brownish color of negative film to "remove", so the negative scan is more "processed", but I've also heard that slide film is less "tolerant" to under/over-exposition and thus more "difficult" to use...

 

[DocFrankenstein]

I wouldnt say slide is more difficult to use. If you underexpose negative, you still lose 2 stops of info.

I've never scanned emulsion, so I don't know the technicalities. But most of the pros do prefer slide to emulsion when scanning it in.

 

[Marctwo]

Have a read of this. I found it very interesting.

 

[boldo]

Have a read of this. I found it very interesting.

yes it is indeed...

a very interesting thing is where it says that digital sensors behave more like slide than like negative when heavily overexposed...

 

[Hertz van Rental]

If you are going to scan them then the question 'tranny or neg' becomes academic. Both can give equally HQ results. If handled correctly you can't tell them apart on a scan. The determining factor becomes choice of actual stock (manufacturer and speed) and how good your exposure is. You only get what is on the film.

 

[ksmattfish]

If you are confident that you can nail the exposure, or don't mind bracketing, I'd say color transparencies are a lot easier to deal with when scanning. Even with software color correcting the orange base of color neg film can be tricky.

 

[Unimaxium]

I scan a lot of my own film, and all my best shots come from good slide film (i.e. Fuji Velvia 50). Although it is trickier to expose properly, once you begin shooting a lot of the same film and get experienced with how it reacts to different exposures, you will become better at exposing properly. While negatives are more tolerant to poor exposure, I tend to find that their quality is not as good when scanned.

One factor to keep in mind, though, is the price difference between the two types of film. Slide films cost significantly more than negative films, and the processing costs for slides can be over twice those of negatives. To give you an idea of the prices involved, the price of Fuji NPS (negative film) at B&H is $3, while the price of Fuji Provia 400F (slide film) is $10. And to process the film, the lab I typically use here in Philadelphia charges $4 for negative film and $10 for slide film. So if budget is an issue, you might find that negative film is a better idea.

And if you want to get the best, DSLR-quality photos from your film, make sure you invest in a slide/negative scanner. Although most ones you'll find are quite expensive, there are a few out there in the $200 range that will get you quite good results. I currently use the Minolta Dimage Scan Dual IV, and get very nice photos from my slides when I use it. I have also read good reviews of the Plustek Opticfilm 7200, which has a much higher DPI than my scanner (although since the 3200DPI of the Minolta is already very large, I doubt you'll get any real increase in image quality with the higher resolution). Scanning film with a flatbed scanner (especially one that doesn't have a special attachment for scanning film) will generally yield much poorer results than one that is dedicated to film.

 

[Marctwo]

I'm in the very early stages of experimenting with film but the important thing to me is the extra hi/lolite info (if this is true).

Some things just can't be exposed properly for digital like swans in the sunlight - they're either completely blown out or you underexpose dramatically and lose shadow detail. It sounds like this is also the case with slide film except that the lolites are completely lost when underexposed.