Kodak Portra 400: Learning to Trust the Light with a Mamiya 645

I didn't go to Lambridge Woods expecting to make great photographs.

In fact, although they're pretty woods, I wouldn't describe them as particularly photogenic. There are pine trees, ferns, brambles and narrow paths winding through them, but nothing particularly dramatic. No grand views, no obvious compositions and, on the day I visited, certainly no spectacular light.

Which was actually rather useful.

I was staying near Henley for the weekend and had a roll of Kodak Portra 400 loaded into my Mamiya 645 Pro. I also had a question I wanted to answer.

Which light meter could I actually trust?

I'd recently been getting some surprisingly different exposure readings depending on how I measured the light. My Mamiya's meter would give me one reading, my Sekonic Zoom Master L-508 another and a free light-meter app on my Android phone something else entirely.

Film isn't particularly cheap, and Kodak Portra 400 certainly isn't, so I wanted to understand what was happening rather than simply guessing.

Lambridge Woods gave me almost perfect conditions for the experiment. It was overcast and humid, and most importantly the light was reasonably consistent.

I wasn't there chasing photographs.

I was there to burn a roll of film.

As it turned out, I came home with rather more than a set of meter readings.

My previous experience with Kodak Portra

This wasn't technically my first roll of Kodak Portra. I'd used it once in a 35mm camera a couple of years ago, but that had been about the extent of my experience with it.

Since returning more seriously to film photography, I'd mostly been shooting black and white.

That hasn't really been a deliberate decision. The summer we've had simply suited the sort of photography I was doing. I've been experimenting with conventional black-and-white film and, increasingly, infrared film. Those experiments have taken me in directions I hadn't really expected.

I don't think I've ever held a particularly strong view about colour film versus black and white.

They're just different.

But I kept seeing photographs made on Kodak Portra 400 that appealed to me.

There was something about the colours.

The greens often looked lovely without becoming fluorescent. Highlights could have an almost creamy quality, and the overall palette seemed gentle and very easy on the eye.

Some of the photographs that really caught my attention weren't portraits at all, despite the name Portra and the film's reputation for skin tones. They were photographs of places, architecture and landscapes.

I remember watching one photography video featuring photographs around Paignton Pier and thinking the colours looked wonderful.

That was much closer to what interested me about Portra.

I don't photograph many people. Landscapes, woodland, architecture and places are much more my thing.

I'd had a roll of Portra 400 sitting around for a while, so eventually it was time to find out what it would do for me.

Mamiya 645 Pro and the 80mm lens

For this roll I used my Mamiya 645 Pro with the Mamiya Sekor C 80mm f/2.8 N.

I shot the entire roll at ISO 400.

There seems to be an enormous amount of advice online about shooting Portra 400 at ISO 200 or deliberately giving it additional exposure. That's something I may experiment with another time, but it wasn't what I wanted from this roll.

Kodak calls it a 400-speed film, so I rated it at 400.

More importantly, I was trying to compare different methods of metering. Introducing deliberate exposure compensation would simply have added another variable.

I also wouldn't start changing the ISO halfway through a roll. The whole roll is ultimately being developed together, and for this particular experiment I wanted to keep things simple and consistent.

There were no filters either.

In retrospect, I wish I'd tried a polarising filter for a couple of frames. The woodland was humid and there was some glare coming from the foliage. A polariser could potentially have controlled some of those reflections and enhanced the colours.

But that's hindsight.

For this first proper outing with Portra 400, it was simply the Mamiya, the 80mm lens and the film.

Three light meters and a rather large difference

The reason I wanted to conduct the test was that I'd seen a fairly substantial difference between different ways of measuring exposure.

I had three options available to me.

There was the meter in the Mamiya itself, my Sekonic Zoom Master L-508 and a free light-meter app on my Android phone.

The Sekonic has a spot-metering facility, so I tried to take readings from what I considered representative midtones within the scene, generally concentrating on the woodland floor rather than bright patches of sky.

The result was interesting.

At f/8, the Mamiya suggested 1/60 second.

The Sekonic suggested 1/60 second.

The Android app suggested approximately 1/13 second, for which I used 1/15 second on the camera.

That's not a tiny discrepancy.

The phone was suggesting roughly two stops more exposure than both the dedicated Sekonic and the meter built into the Mamiya.

And that was exactly why I'd gone into the woods to test them.

If all three had been within a fraction of a stop of one another, there wouldn't really have been a story.

Why consistent light mattered

The rather dull conditions were an advantage.

If I'd tried doing the same experiment on a day when clouds were moving rapidly across the sun, the test would have been fairly meaningless. The illumination could have changed between one reading and the next.

Instead, Lambridge Woods was sitting beneath a fairly consistent blanket of overcast light.

It wasn't exciting photographic light, but it was useful light.

I could take a reading with the Mamiya, compare it with the Sekonic and then check the phone without worrying too much that the scene had fundamentally changed in the few seconds between them.

The agreement between the Mamiya and Sekonic was reassuring.

Two completely separate meters were effectively telling me the same thing.

The phone wasn't.

That doesn't mean every light-meter app on every smartphone is inaccurate. It means that on my Android phone, with the free app I was using, I don't think I can trust it sufficiently for what I'm doing.

That's an important distinction.

A phone app might be perfectly adequate on another device, or another app may behave differently. But when I'm putting a £20 roll of film into a medium-format camera, I'd rather use the evidence I've gathered myself than assume an app is correct.

For the rest of this roll, I mostly trusted the Mamiya.

I occasionally compared its reading with the Sekonic, but I didn't apply any additional exposure compensation.

Shooting Kodak Portra 400 at box speed

Portra has a reputation for handling overexposure extremely well, and deliberately overexposing Portra has almost become part of the folklore surrounding the film.

But I wanted to know what Kodak Portra 400 at ISO 400 looked like.

Not Portra 400 rated at 200.

Not Portra 400 with an extra stop added because somebody on YouTube told me that's what you're supposed to do.

Just Portra 400 at its stated speed.

That also made more sense for the meter test. Once I'd established that the Sekonic and Mamiya were agreeing, I could simply use the camera's meter and concentrate on making photographs.

And that's when the afternoon became more interesting.

The technical test was effectively over, but there were still frames left in the Mamiya.

I might as well photograph the woods.

Pretty, but not particularly photogenic

There's a difference between somewhere being beautiful and somewhere making an obvious photograph.

Lambridge Woods is a pleasant place to walk through.

But photographically, it's quite chaotic.

There are trunks everywhere. Ferns overlap other ferns. Branches cut across things. Dark evergreen foliage sits beside lighter deciduous foliage. The woodland floor is a mixture of green, brown and dead vegetation.

There isn't necessarily an obvious subject.

I actually quite enjoyed that.

Because I'd gone there primarily to test the film and my metering, there wasn't much pressure to return with something spectacular.

That changed the way I worked.

Instead of hunting for the photograph, I simply started looking at what was around me.

One camera, one lens

The 80mm on the Mamiya 645 is essentially my normal lens.

And that was all I had.

I didn't spend the afternoon thinking that a scene would work better if only I had a wide-angle lens. I didn't see something in the distance and wish I'd brought a telephoto.

The thought barely occurred to me.

I had an 80mm lens.

Therefore I had to make photographs that worked with an 80mm lens.

I've increasingly found that sort of restriction liberating.

Modern digital photography gives us an extraordinary number of choices. Multiple lenses, enormous resolution, autofocus modes, exposure simulation, virtually unlimited frames and the ability to immediately examine what we've made.

None of those things are bad.

But sometimes having fewer choices makes the actual act of photographing easier.

With the Mamiya I had one lens, one film stock and fifteen frames.

Well, fourteen useful frames.

One was sacrificed to an extremely dodgy selfie that definitely won't be troubling my portfolio.

Working slowly with the Mamiya 645

I had the Mamiya mounted on my lighter travel tripod and was trying to be reasonably methodical.

Normally I'd use a cable release, particularly when working with the mirror locked up.

Unfortunately, somewhere during the trip I managed to lose the little cable-release adapter.

That meant pressing the shutter release on the camera itself.

This wasn't ideal.

The woodland floor was soft and I could actually see a small amount of flex in the tripod when I touched the camera. With the mirror already raised I had removed one possible source of vibration, only to introduce another with my finger.

I was worried I'd get the film back and discover slightly soft photographs.

Fortunately, I can't see any obvious loss of sharpness in the resulting images.

It was still a useful reminder that the stability of a tripod isn't only about the tripod itself. What you're standing it on matters as well.

A perfectly rigid tripod planted into soft woodland floor can still move.

Landscape is easier. Portrait was better.

I very nearly photographed everything horizontally.

Mostly through laziness.

Turning a medium-format camera on a conventional tripod head isn't particularly elegant. The camera ends up hanging off to one side and the whole arrangement becomes more awkward.

An L-bracket would make life considerably easier.

Or perhaps Father Christmas could bring me a Mamiya RB67 with its rotating back.

I suspect the L-bracket would be cheaper.

Fortunately, I did make the effort to turn the camera for a few photographs because my favourite image from the roll is a vertical composition.

It's a very simple photograph looking along a narrow path through the trees.

The portrait orientation emphasises the tall, straight trunks while the path gives the eye somewhere to go. Nothing spectacular is happening. There's no dramatic shaft of sunlight or perfectly positioned figure.

It's just a woodland path.

But it's the photograph from the roll I keep returning to.

Had I stuck with landscape orientation simply because it was easier, I wouldn't have made it.

The colours of Kodak Portra 400

This was the part I was most interested in.

And yes, I now understand some of the enthusiasm surrounding Portra.

The colours are extremely easy on the eye.

The woodland contains an enormous range of greens, yet they don't feel aggressively saturated. There is enough separation between the foliage, ferns and darker vegetation to stop everything merging into one mass of green.

The tree trunks have subtle pinks, browns and muted reds.

The highlights are gentle and slightly creamy rather than stark white.

Nothing seems to jump out of the image screaming for attention.

That's probably what I like most.

There are films and digital processing styles that can make woodland look extraordinarily vibrant. Greens become almost luminous and autumn browns turn orange.

That can work beautifully.

But it wasn't what I wanted here.

The Portra images feel softer and calmer.

I don't mean soft in terms of sharpness. There's plenty of detail from the Mamiya negative and 80mm lens.

I mean softer in character.

Is Portra better than digital?

No.

It's different.

I think trying to establish whether film is better than digital is largely pointless.

Had I taken my Fujifilm GFX into the same woodland, I could have made technically superb files with enormous resolution, excellent dynamic range and complete control over colour afterwards.

Once you've made the initial investment in digital equipment, taking another photograph also costs effectively nothing.

Film is the opposite.

Every press of the shutter uses something.

With Portra 400 currently costing me around £20 a roll before processing, you are very aware that there are only fifteen exposures in the Mamiya.

But I'm not shooting film because I believe it's technically superior to digital.

I like that it feels different.

The resulting photographs feel different too.

Portra has given these woodland scenes a gentle rendering that I find very appealing. Could I recreate something similar digitally?

Almost certainly.

But that isn't really the point.

I made these with Portra.

Then frame 14 exploded

Everything had been going remarkably smoothly.

And then there was frame fourteen.

A huge red light leak runs across the photograph.

I have absolutely no idea what happened.

The frame immediately before it is fine.

The frame immediately after it is fine.

I've never previously had a light leak from this Mamiya.

Had it happened at the beginning or end of the roll, I could probably come up with a plausible explanation involving loading or unloading the film. But this was the second-to-last frame and the frames either side aren't affected.

Perhaps there was some issue with the film itself.

Perhaps I did something without realising it.

I don't know.

And rather than inventing an explanation, I'm quite happy leaving it at that.

Sometimes film does something weird.

Frame fourteen certainly did.

Fifteen frames also means fewer mistakes

One thing that did please me was that I didn't lose frames through the way I handled the Mamiya.

I've previously had a few problems while using the power winder, and when you're only getting fifteen exposures from a roll, wasting one is particularly irritating.

This time I was very careful with the dark slide and the way I operated the camera.

Apart from the deliberately questionable selfie, I got fourteen photographs from the roll.

I've subsequently bought a manual winding crank for the Mamiya, which should make the camera simpler to use and hopefully remove one more opportunity for me to accidentally waste film.

Again, it's part of learning the camera.

I'm getting to the point where I don't have to think quite so much about the mechanics of using it.

That leaves more room for thinking about photographs.

What would I change next time?

The obvious thing is the polariser.

In humid woodland, foliage reflects quite a lot of light. A polarising filter could have reduced some of that glare and potentially given the greens even greater depth.

I'd certainly experiment with one next time rather than necessarily using it for every frame.

I'd also like an easier way of switching between horizontal and vertical compositions on the tripod.

Beyond that, though, I wouldn't change very much.

I don't regret using only the 80mm.

I don't regret rating Kodak Portra 400 at ISO 400.

And I'm particularly glad I didn't spend the afternoon bracketing everything simply because film photographers are sometimes told that Portra loves overexposure.

The Mamiya meter and Sekonic agreed.

I trusted them.

The photographs came out.

That's useful information.

How much editing does Portra need?

For my own scans, my intention is to keep the processing relatively restrained.

I'll make the negative conversion using Negative Lab Pro and then deal with exposure where necessary, along with the inevitable dust or scratches.

I don't particularly want to push the colours around.

Part of the reason I'm interested in trying different films is to see what they actually give me.

If I take a Portra negative and then spend twenty minutes transforming its colours into something completely different, I lose some of the reason I chose Portra in the first place.

That doesn't mean I regard film as sacred or believe a negative shouldn't be edited.

Darkroom photographers have always adjusted photographs.

But with this particular roll, I like what I'm seeing.

There isn't much I want to change.

Is Kodak Portra 400 worth the price?

It's expensive.

There's no getting around that.

A roll is around £20 before I've even paid for development. Compare that with digital, where the marginal cost of pressing the shutter is effectively zero, and film makes very little financial sense.

But hobbies don't always have to make financial sense.

I'm also becoming more selective about what I photograph on film.

Fifteen exposures from a roll of 645 doesn't bother me. If anything, I quite like it.

I don't return home with 300 variations of essentially the same composition.

I have fifteen.

Sometimes fewer.

For me, the question isn't whether Portra 400 offers good value measured against digital photography. It obviously can't compete on that basis.

The question is whether I like making photographs with it enough to buy another roll.

And I do.

Where I want to take Kodak Portra 400 next

I'm not sure this roll has suddenly made me a colour-film photographer.

I'm not even convinced there needs to be such a distinction.

I've shot more black-and-white film this summer simply because the conditions and the ideas I've been exploring have suited it.

If we get a proper autumn, I suspect I'll shoot considerably more colour.

There is another location where I'd particularly like to put some Kodak Portra 400 through the Mamiya.

Valencia.

I've photographed Valencia before and know the light reasonably well.

Strong Spanish sunshine. Blue skies. The beach. Warm architecture.

And particularly the extraordinary buildings around the City of Arts and Sciences.

I've seen enough photographs made on Portra in strong sunlight to have an idea of what those colours might look like.

The combination of Portra 400, the Mamiya 645 and that 80mm lens could be wonderful there.

But I don't actually know.

And perhaps that's becoming one of my favourite things about shooting film.

I can speculate about what a film will do. I can watch other photographers use it. I can read reviews, study sample photographs and learn about its latitude and colour palette.

Eventually, though, I have to put a roll in the camera and find out for myself.

Lambridge Woods was supposed to answer a simple question about light meters.

Instead, it answered another one as well.

Yes.

I really do like Kodak Portra 400.