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Shooting a night exterior using streetlamps with..


DavidSloan

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Dark! The fastest Kodak daylight MP film is 250 ASA. Fuji makes a 500D, but is it availbale in 16mm (not sure)?

 

In any case, sodium vapor streetlights are pretty pinkish-orange to begin with, and balancing for daylight will make them look even more so. They also have a discontinuous color spectrum, so color reproduction will be pretty limited to pinkish-orange only.

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Fuji 500D is available in 16mm as far as I know.

 

If you're curious what a daylight film looks like at night, check out "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" shot by Ellen Kuras entirely on Fuji Reala 500D (in 35mm of course), I believe it was all pushed one stop and rated ay 1000ASA. There's a big article in American Cinematographer from April 2004 that you can look at, but I seem to recall that she didn't use correction filters even for day interiors with tungsten practicals, so I'd guess that she probably didn't have any for night exteriors either (especially considering that a #80 eats up almost two stops). The film went through a digital intermediate, so bear in mind that it's not an "out-of-the-box" look that they're getting.

 

Theoretically, the added fourth color layer in the 500D MIGHT help yield a better image under a discontinuous source such as a sodium vapor lamp, but that's pure speculation. I know it's supposed to help somewhat with fluorescent sources, so maybe it'll help with sodium vapor lights as well.

 

Overall though, daylight should have a warmer bias than shooting with tungsten stock, as Michael Nash notes.

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As far as I know, the fourth layer helps mitigate green from fluorescent lights. So if you are shooting in mixed light with various types of fluoroscent lamps the fourth layer helps to bring the image closer to neutral. Works nicely for the still stuff I've seen.

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