Nigel

[shreddog]

Nigel I was reading your response about places to develop film and you mentioned to get exact color you need a 85 b for 7240 type film. Do you mean for indoor or both indoor and outoor? Also do have any suggestions for dealing with snow exposure. I have trouble with the contrast form a person and the snow?

[Nigel]

You need an 85B for Daylight shooting to get the proper color. Also what I would do for snow exposures is to spotmeter the subject and expose at that stop. Also you could try some expriments because your camera may be different. Try shooting a subject in snow with a grey card and a sign telling what stop you are at--then bracket. Good Luck

[mattias]

no, don't expose for the subject in snowy conditions. measure the reflected light from the snow and expose two stops over that. otherwise, at least with reversal stock, the snow will burn out. if the subject gets too dark, use a bounce card to fill the shadows and/or move to an angle where the subject's more brightly lit.

[Nigel]

Matt--
I have shot plenty of subjects in the snow using an ND and spotmetering thier face. The snow does lose a lot of detail but it is all white anyway, and shows little detail. I suggested this because it would give them a way to test their camera and the way that they want to expose the scene--It is a test.

[mattias]

yeah, you're probably right. i was approaching the question from the point of view of a former professional snowboarding photographer. in that field, the background has to be correctly exposed or you can't print it, since white on white paper basically looks like shit. i once shot some slides in the alps that looked *amazing*, but no magazine could print them, even though they were very interested.

[shreddog]

matties i am filming snowboarding and would be grateful for any tips you may have on super 8 filming for shredding the detail of the snow is something thats very important for me since filming is going to be done in BC and the high Alpine is where will be filming. AS far as grey cards im not sure about how you apply them. I was going to use a warming filter for bluebird days. What do ya think? One thing is though that I have a auxillery wide angle that is perfect for booters but the thread on it is a cone like shape, I cant find any filter or step up ring to fit this thing. Anyhow thanks for the input shreddog let it snow

[Nigel]

I shot all the Super8 on a snowboarding film sponsored by Pabst beer last winter. I shot Kodachrome40 with an 85ND to keep my F-stop at about 5.6, I shoot on a Beaulieu 4008ZMII everything I shot looked great. The grey card is used to show your color and if it is correct. You should not have any real problems if you use an ND and make sure that you expose for the subject. In my opinion.

[mattias]

depends on the terrain. if you're shooting park/pipe with a lot of "high constrast references" like people, trees and so on, measuring incident light (with a dome light meter) or spotting the subject (by zooming in and reading the internal meter for example) will probably work.

some kind of zone system must probably be used in high alpine areas though. you don't want to overexpose the snow or the sky by more than two or three stops in my opinion. this is for ektachrome and velvia slide film, which should have similar latitude to kodachrome super-8? i honestly don't know exactly.

a warming filter is probably a good idea, although a uv filter might be enough and will give you more natural colors. yellow snow sounds like a bad idea. ;-)

[This message has been edited by mattias (edited November 07, 2000).]