Kodak's Portra 400 film is praised for its versatility, but exactly how well does it handle underexposure and overexposure? How far can you push things before your photos become unusable? Canadian photographer Kyle McDougall decided to find out by doing his own test.
One of the things about film photography is that exposure on film, unlike in digital photography, is not equivalent at all to overall brightness of an image.
With the release of the D750, much has been made of its ability to recover shadow detail. Given the range of talents that the D750 has it is strange that this has been singled out given that the D800 and D4, released in 2012, outperform it in this regard, and the cheaper D600 (also from 2012) is able to match it at base ISO. And the old guard, the D700, D3 and D3s, weren’t too shabby at recovery either!
With news of incredible shadow recovery typically there comes two responses: the hyperbolic “That’s amazing! I want one NOW!” and the cynical “you wouldn’t need shadow recovery if you exposed right.” There is, of course that third response: ‘I wish the 5D MkIII could do that’ but I won’t get into that here…