Pushing 400D Until it’s No Longer Mid - Part 1
As part of how I have the blog section is planned I will be going back over previous videos from the past few months and adding them with small write ups, galleries and image reviews.
Since I shot my first roll of 400D I have always thought the look of all the shots I got out of it was well, mid. In this video I push two rolls 1 and 2 stops to see if there is a way to fix 400D and make the rest of my stash bearable to shoot.
Gallery
All of the images here were scanned with a Fuji X-S10 and converted in Negative Lab Pro.
Cinestill 400D Pushed to 800 - Fuji GW 690
My main gripe with 400D has always been with its lack of contrast. I know that because it is a modified Vision 3 film stock that low contrast, logarithmic looking images are to be expected but no amount of editing or tweaking scans, or changing scanning methods could get my to where I wanted to be. Simply pushing the film stock up to ISO 800 greatly increased the contrast while still maintaining a huge dynamic range. From the get go these took very little work to get them to an acceptable white balance and exposure in scanning. While I’m not 100% satisfied with them I can say pushing 400D to 800 is a great way to get a much better SOOC image from this stock.
Cinestill 400D Pushed to 1600 - Fuji GW 690
1600 is where things start to get difficult with pushing 400D. There is still a great amount of dynamic range in each photo, but pushing this far starts to introduce some significant color shifts. Some of which are more easily fixed than others. Take the two railway shots for example. The color and exposure balanced nicely, and fairly easily in NLP. Shots 2 and 4 on the bridge though did not, and were stuck with green and yellow casts respectively. Contrast again has increased which is to be expected with a two stop push. Pushing 400D could be a great tool for squeezing a little more out of your camera with faster shutter speeds or wide apertures in the late evening and beyond golden hour. But it does come with the cost of decreased dynamic range and introducing color casts.
