Where silver meets pixels

This photograph was taken along the Lake Superior shoreline at Porcupine State Park in Michigan. I used an OM-4 with the Zuiko 24/2.8

Film used for this picture is Kodak T400CN which is a chromogenic film. This film has been very difficult to use in the darkroom, but it scans exceptionally well. I scanned this with the latest version of Vuescan (8.4.29) on the Nikon Coolscan V-ED. The only editing was a slight amount of contrast enhancement, resizing and sharpening. (click on the image to see a larger version).

Exposure was determined using Multi-Spot Metering in Manual mode. I spot metered several spots in the sky as well as shadow locations. To preserve DOF, I first set my aperture to provide desired image sharpness and adjusted shutter-speed last. In the OM-4 viewfinder, there are marks in the exposure scale indicating +2 and -2 stops. I adjusted the shutter-speed to keep all the dots within these marks. If the exposure dots extend beyond the 4-stop range, it is necessary to determine which is more important to preserve--shadows or highlights. As highlights were most important in this case, with the sky and the birch bark, I would have made sure the dots didn't extend beyond the +2 mark.

T400CN does have an extensive toe and shoulder, which really gives us about 11-stops of usable dynamic range, so it isn't overly necessary to worry about over or under-exposing the film. But the scanning process is dynamic-range limited.

Regardess, the digitization process of film gives us a greater usable dynamic range, with a real toe and shoulder than a digital camera.