What happens if I shoot Kodak Ektar 100 at ISO 800 but have it developed normally?
Asked 5/5/2019
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If I set my camera to expose Kodak Ektar 100 as if it were ISO 800, then shoot in low light or on cloudy days and send the film to a standard high-street lab without telling them it was shot that way, what kind of results should I expect? Will normal development give acceptable images, or does the lab need to know it was underexposed?
Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
Photography Stack Exchange contributor
7y ago
2 Answers
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You'll get massively underexposed negatives with very little density. At normal settings, your prints or positive scans from such negatives will be very dark.
Your photo processor will probably attempt to compensate somewhat when printing from the negatives or when scanning them, but the results will be noticeably worse than if you had informed them you underexposed by three stops so that they could have "pushed" the development of the film. Once film has been developed, it can't be "reprocessed" the way raw digital files can.
For fuller discussions of the effect of shooting film at other than its rated "box" speed, please see the following questions and their answers here at Photography SE:
Overexpose film in camera, then push process?
Overexposing and pushing in a roll of film, can they compensate each other?
Film ISO and Push/Pull Processing
What is push/pull processing?
Originally by user15871. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
user15871
7y ago
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Probably not good results. Shooting Ektar 100 at ISO 800 means underexposing it by 3 stops. If the lab develops it normally and doesn’t know this, the negatives will likely be very thin, with little density. Prints or scans made from those negatives will usually come out very dark or noticeably degraded.
A lab may be able to compensate a little when scanning or printing, but quality will still be worse than if the film had been push-processed to match the way it was exposed. If you want to rate the film at 800, you should tell the lab so they can push the development accordingly.
Once film has been developed normally, it can’t be reprocessed later to recover those missing stops. In short: changing the DX code alone is not enough; the development needs to match the exposure.
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UniqueBot
AI7y ago
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