Using daylight film with studio lights

VirtualAdept

VirtualAdept

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Mads
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I was considering using some of my vista film to do some portraits of the wife and son using the studio flash setup I have.
Normally, using digital, I adjust the white balance to suit the lighting, but I was wondering how you'd go about that when using film thats meant to be used in daylight.

I assume you can get film designed for use with flashes etc :shrug:, but for the time being I'm not buying any extra film, so I'm stuck with the vista for now.
 
Hi,

Tungsten balanced film is now something unfortunately confined to the past, so theres two ways of doing it, the old way and the modern way:

In the old way you use a blue 80A or B filter to convert the warmer tungsten light to daylight, whilst this is very effective you lose about 2 stops with an 80A filter and 1 and two thirds of a stop with an 80B and there is obviously the presence of a filter which can potentially degrade quality.

In the modern way however, you just shoot it as normal and during the scanning stage adjust the white balance to normal before printing. Whilst this may be the modern way, it was possible to do with the traditional optical printing method using colour correction filters but only professional labs tended to offer it as it took too long and was quite complex.

The other possible way is to gel the lights with a wratten 85 filter gel to change them to outputting 'daylight'.

Hope this answers your question.
 
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I hadn't even thought as far ahead as scanning. What a muppet.

Thanks for the reply Samuel, it answered it perfectly :)
 
Most flashes are approximately the same colour temperature as daylight so you should be o.k. It's only with tungsten lighting that you would need to use a filter.


Steve.
 
Steve Smith said:
Most flashes are approximately the same colour temperature as daylight so you should be o.k. It's only with tungsten lighting that you would need to use a filter.


Steve.
Click to expand...

Nearly all on camera flashes are, but studio lights like he's going to be using are normally tungsten balanced.
 
Steve Smith said:
Really? I didn't know that.


Steve.
Click to expand...

Alright slight little revision, continuous lighting is normally tungsten balanced but electronic flash studio units like discussed here are normally daylight balanced :bonk: . I forgot that little difference between the two, sorry!
 
That's probably why I didn't know that then!!!

In that case... carry on with the daylight balanced film!


Steve.
 
Most studio flashes are in the 5200K+ region and daylight film is normally rated at about 5500K so you should be laughing! :)
 
I just had a brief look at the lights and did a bit of google-fu, and they come up as 5500l give or take 100.

Result!
 
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