[bikehead90]

This may be an odd question, but seeing as Fuji cameras have settings to emulate some of their more famous emulsions, is there a setting I can use on my K1 for Kodak P3200 film? I’ve never shot the film personally, but I have seen some of the legendary band/nightclub shots and like what I see. I have a sneaking suspicion that there’s more to it than just setting your ISO to 800(or pushed to 3200) and putting it in monochrome. I’ve got a friend in a band and he’d like some shots taken during his next few concerts (once everything returns to “normal”) and I’d like to shoot his concerts with this “P3200”

[pres589]

Lightroom and some plugin like the old Nik Collection and some playing around should get you there. Use RAW files out of the camera and a lens like the FA 77 or an 85 wide open or one click down from wide open with SR and 1/125th/sec exposure time and whatever ISO gets you a visible image and you can fix the rest in post. The nice thing about converting to black and white (or near enough to be black and white) is that sensor noise is in my opinion less distracting to look at vs. full color shooting.


I think I shot a single roll of T-Max P3200 and found it to be high contrast and grainy but not aggressively so (like, say, trying to push Foma 400 multiple stops) There's more going on there than just a black and white conversion with a bit of high-ISO noise. Just doing a black and white conversion can result in kind of "flat" images which is hard to describe but when you see it, you see it.


I've wished that Fuji would sell a plugin like Nik Collection so people could apply their image tweaks to images at their computer and with images from anyone's camera. I also understand why Fuji would probably not be interested as it keeps their cameras a bit more special.

[Alex645]

I would not degrade the image on a K1 just to try to match what 35mm Kodak P3200 TMax Pro would look like. Instead I would shoot RAW at the lowest ISO possible and then convert it in post processing.

I have Nik's Silver Efex Pro 2 as a plug-n with Photoshop, but you can also use it as a stand alone app. Here's a link with a free trial:
Silver Efex Pro - Master the art of black-and-white photography

In Silver Efex Pro 2 there is a submenu under "Film Types" to emulate many emulsions including Kodak P3200 TMax Pro and you can play with other parameters such as grain, sensitivity, and levels and curves to simulate what different developers or push processing would do to that film.

If you really would rather not do it in post, then at least you could run a test with the trial version and then trial and error with different jpeg settings in the K1 menu until you matched the results.

The Nik Collection also has an Analog Efex Pro 2 if you want to emulate different color emulsions as well.

Personally I have mixed feelings about all this. For example I used to shoot Infrared Ektachrome with a yellow filter back in the day. To some degree I can fake it with Photoshop, but for about $350 I could convert an old DSLR into a dedicated IR camera. Even then, I'd need to use a lens filter and do some Photoshop channel switching to get the IR results I'm after. Part of me thinks fake is fake. But part of me feels if it looks like the real thing, does it matter if it wasn't created in the original manner?

Well....I guess I don't care or mind if it was "faked", but there is something more gratifying when I know it wasn't.

[tuco]

Here is a shot using Kodak's TMZ. It is really grainy due to both the size of a small format negative and of course the ISO. Bear in mind this is only a 800 pixel tall image. Double the size and the grain is really noticeable. The tonal scale of TMZ in small format is often not that great by comparison so you'd need to crush your blacks to emulate that attribute of the film too.


TMZ

[TwoUptons]

I shot a lot of TMax 3200 in the 90s, often pushed to 12,800. Pushed that far, you might as well tape some Painted gravel to a piece of paper...

That said, there was nothing else like it at the time. As I remember (and this may have had as much to do with my development as anything), it did like to block up he blacks, but if you exposed it right, it had a very usable tonal range.

And it was basically perfect for newspaper reproduction, where halftones don’t mind the grain. Indoor basketball with a 50mm f1.4 or Takumar 135 f2.5 in a dark university gym... just the trick...

I like Tuco’s shot, and I know how grainy it would be if it were larger

If I was trying to replicate the look, I would do it in post processing.
On a K-1, you have so much more capability than P3200 ever had.
You could shoot much cleaner and then noise it up later...

-Eric