At Thanksgiving time I shot two rolls of Kodak Gold MAX 400 indoors
taking shots of the family. The first roll was my normal people
snapshooting using mostly the 85/2. Most shots were wide open or nearly
so since there was not much natural light. The film was developed and
printed using Walmart 1 hour service and all looks fine despite the fact
that (as I discovered later) both rolls were 2 months out of date.
The second roll, shot the next day, was a different story. The day was
gloomy and even f/2 and 400 ASA weren't good enough inside. So, I
decided to use flash which I rarely use and generally dislike. As an
experiment, I used my recently purchased (from Brian Huber) T-32 and BG2
as a bounce flash and added my little Vivitar 555FD on the hot shoe as a
direct flash. I then fitted my Kiron 70-150 and set it variously at
f/5.6-8. The film was processed at another 1 hour service place.
Yikes! The prints looked so ugly that I have chosen not to show them to
the subjects. To see whether this ugliness was on the film vs. the
print I loaded a few negatives into my newly acquired Acer Scanwit and
saw that, yes indeed, the ugliness is right there on the negative too.
The problem is that the flash shots seem to be exceptionally sharp and
constrasty and also exceptionally red. Minor skin blemishes in the
adults have been super accentuated. Everyone seem to have ugly reddish
and/or brownish skin blemishes and blood shot eyes. A quick check in
Photoshop (which I don't know how to use yet) shows that I can get a
much better (but still not good) picture by significantly lowering the
contrast and the red content.
So, where did all this redness and contrast come from? Of particular
films I know little. I usually use whatever Kodak or Fuji 200 is on
sale at the local drug store. Is the Kodak Gold MAX 400 known to be
especially contrasty and red or was there something about the processing
of this roll that made it different. Is my Kiron 70-150 at f/8
responsible for accentuating minor skin blemishes that my 85 at f/2
manages to blur over? Is the flash in some way responsible or is it
only that the bright light allowed me to shoot at f/8 and get a much
sharper and contrastier image?
I'd have to classify this whole roll of film as the ugliest photographs
I've ever taken in my 35 years of casual photography. Any suggestions
or comments would be appreciated.
Chuck Norcutt
Woburn, Massachusetts, USA
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