Pushing Kodak Gold to 3200, to shoot gigs in the dark!
I highly recommend listening to Kite's album 'V' while reading this!
also this post is a bit of a ramble about my process, so beware!!
I like taking photos in dark places. Be that abandoned places, at night, or at gigs!
Especially at gigs though, because I ADORE live music!
However, shooting exclusively film in the dark is challenging.
Colour film only really gets up to 800ISO these days, and there's not much choice at that speed.
You've got Portra 800, Lomo 800 (aka Portra 800 in a trenchcoat), and Cinestill/Vision3 500T. That's all.
and even 800ISO isn't quite enough to shoot handheld using only available light, with a huge Fujica GW690, at a gig where you're moving about.
So over the years, I've become quite fond of push processing colour film to make it as fast as possible.
It lets me use higher shutter speeds, apertures that aren't just 'wide open', and it gives a really nice gritty and ethereal effect which I LOVE.
My usual choices for this are Portra 800 at 3200, or Fuji's Pro400H at 1600.
Unfortunately though, Portra is now £3ish a shot, and I'm fresh out of Pro400H. (RIP, why does all the film I like get discontinued anyway?)
It looks like it's time to get experimenting!
Why Gold?
It's cheap, it's available, and the internet said pushing it is a bad idea :)
Simple!
That's one hell of a difference!
With that in mind, I went off to see Kite and shoot some!
Shooting the stuff
At the show, I'd decided to really test the limits of the Gold.
I already had a roll of photos that I knew would turn out great on Pro400H, so there was nothing to lose!
So, the Gold was shot with shutter speeds from 1/30 to 1/125, and apertures from f/3.5 to f/5.6, in a very dark and foggy venue lit only by stage strobes and lasers.
Challenging stuff for a box speed of 200!
The show was EXCELLENT too, even got to do a meet-and-greet, talk about my photography, and get an album signed! 12/10 stars!!
Processing time
Once I'd got back, I prepared a fresh batch of Bellini's C-41 chemistry (the Rolls Royce of colour chems!) and loaded the film into a tank.
A couple of hours later, after warming up to 38C in a water bath, I was ready to process!
I gave the Gold a 4 stop push in the developer, extending the standard 3m15s time to 5m15s, 30 seconds extra per stop of push.
Then it was bleached for 45s, fixed for 3 minutes, and after finally stabilising for a minute, I was ready to hang it up to dry in the front room and have a look!
Wow! That worked way better than I expected!
The negs are nice and dense, and there's plenty of colour. Sweet!
Once they'd dried off, I pulled out my scanner and got to work.
Don't buy an Epson V550, and especially don't sell your Nikon Coolscan III to buy it! It is SHITE.
I gained the ability to scan 120, I lost the ability to get sharp fucking scans.
This thing cannot focus on film to save its life, the film holder barely holds film, and somehow 3200dpi on this is worse than 2700dpi from the Nikon.
Thankfully, I'm making up for my sins by grabbing a Coolscan 9000 :)
The film was scanned in as 3200dpi DNGs using VueScan, inverted using Negative Lab Pro, then colour graded and any dust edited out in Photoshop.
I do like my hybrid process, it's the best of both worlds!
and of course I keep the negatives, because you can make HUGE prints from those!
but, enough waffle, where are...
The Results!
Wow. I am IMPRESSED!
Even though I apparently missed the focus, those are pretty damn good!
The colour is great, lighting effects come through brilliantly, there's just the right amount of grain, and detail is pretty good in the shadows!
Plus, it captured the energy in the room AMAZINGLY!
In fact, I'm willing to say that Gold 200 pushes better than Pro400H (although the fact that my 400H expired in 2022 may have something to do with that)
For comparison here's some Pro400H @1600, at Grace Petrie's last Bristol show;
Ok, there's a little bit more grain in the Gold, but it's not at all unpleasant.
In fact it fits with Kite's style of music, gritty dark synthpop :)
Overall though, I am very impressed!
I'll definitely be shooting pushed Gold again in future!
As always, thank you very much for reading!
If you want more, you can find years of my photos over at my Flickr too :)
and for the curious, here's what Gold at it's rated speed looks like under the same conditions.
I had one shot left from the previous day, so thought I'd try...
Yikes...
also yes, this film was minging. I had to re-wash this roll because of filthy stabiliser, but could not be arsed to rescan this shot!
Now, go and have a brew (unless you've made it into Caffenol) :)
I'll be back soon with Part 2 of my smart heating adventure, so keep an eye out!