Tales on Film

A color film I use a lot in low light situations is the Fuji press 800. It’s another film I’m burning through the last rolls I could get my hands on. This film was also sold as Fuji Superia 800 on 24 exp. It’s basically a high speed film designed for outdoor use in low light. On the internet I find mixed reports of pushing it to a higher iso, I have pushed it in development and found that it indeed depends on the scene.

You can use the film indoors but it gives a bit of a warm tone, as you can see in the picture at the beginning of this post. I don’t really like the warm tones here because most lights indoors are already warmer and when you add more warm light to it, it ends up very fast being orange.

What I however do like about this film is the colors when photographing outside in lower light conditions. It renders skintone quite beautifully and in comparison to Kodak film of higher speed, it doesn’t has any tendency to turn red when used outdoors.

For a high speed color film there is not that much noise, even as you can see in this photo pushed 1 stop in development. Off course it doesn’t have as fine a grain as does the Kodak portra 400, but I find it very acceptable.

Also when pushed 1 stop in development I find the overall colors and saturation work very well in tungsten light. I find that the film does look like, what you see at that moment. For example this picture was taken with only street lights at night around 11pm.

Overexposure is handled quite well by the press 800, you can still see a lot of detail in the areas surrounding the sun. As you also can see in the photo is that the film has a pretty wide latitude and is a good film for beginners to not be too perfect about their light metering.

The film is overall quite saturated, but blues get even an extra touch of saturation, which I do like because it provides a very vivid background when you shoot something with some sky in the background.

Overall the Fuji press/superia 800 is my go to film for high speed situations, because it’s a lot cheaper than the Kodak portra and it has less of a habit to turn yellow. I actually hope that Fuji gets back into making some decent c-41 film and don’t only focus on their slides line, because I personally prefer to shoot with fuji film instead of kodak. That’s off course with one exception for the Kodak Portra 400, but overall I find the colors of fuji a lot more appealing to me.

I noticed in the search results of this site, that there is a huge interest in the different film types you can find. I’m only reviewing the film I have used till now and keep in mind that these are my personal opinions