Pushing It In Color: Part One

By Kevin Lane

As many of you know, I like to use my film cameras at the elementary school where I teach to shoot photos for the school yearbook. It's fun for me to use my vintage cameras, but also it gives me chances to practice my shooting technique. I convinced the other members of the yearbook team to purchase a quantity of inexpensive Kodak ColorPlus 200 film for me to use, so that I wouldn't have to spend my own money. In return I try to make sure they get all the photographs they need.

As for cameras, I mostly have been using my Minolta Maxxum 7000, which was the first autofocus SLR that had the autofocus mechanism in the camera body and not the lens. The 7000 is an excellent camera, but because it was a "1st generation" autofocus camera, the autofocus is quite slow and easily confused. Still I like using it for photography children, whose movements can be unpredictable. When I need a flash (which I need a lot inside a school building) I use the powerful Minolta 4000 AF. The children always have the same reaction to the flash ("whoa!!!"), because otherwise the only "flash" they see is on a cell phone.

When I am photographing in a classroom, I worry that the brightness of the flash and the sound of the shutter and auto winder will result in me becoming a distraction for the students and the teacher. So, I began to think about ways I could shoot without flash. I knew of two high speed color films, Kodak Portra 800 and Lomography Color Negative 800, but since I already had some film on hand at the school, I decided to look into pushing the ColorPlus 200.

As you probably know, "pushing" is the practice of I did some research online and found examples of ColorPlus 200 being pushed two stops and more, and the results were better than I expected. But how much pushing would I need to shoot in my school's classrooms? To answer that question, I employed a recently acquired Minolta Autometer IIIF (thank you Wayne Setser!). This handheld light meter fills a big void in my gear:  an incident light meter that, as such, measures the light falling on the subject, rather than the light the subject reflects (as all in-camera light meters do).  If you know the amount of available light in a room, then you can make choices as to ISO, shutter speed, and aperture accordingly.  Using the Autometer IIF, I determined two things:  First, our classrooms are very well-lit with the light being uniform in every classroom I tested, and second, I could freely shoot at f4 at 1/60 of a second if my ISO was 800, which would be a two-stop push for ColorPlus 200.

My next step was to choose a camera. The Maxxum 7000 already had ColorPlus in it, but it was being shot at EI 200. And when you put the autofocus mechanism together with the mirror slap and the autowinder, you've got quite a noise maker. No, this was a job for a manual rangefinder camera with a quite leaf shutter, and so I chose to use my newly cleaned, lubricated, and adjusted Minolta 7s.
It's sharp 45mm lens would work just fine in classroom environments, and no one would ever know when I snapped a photo. Because I already knew my exposure settings, I would not need the cameras on-board light meter.

So, I have pre-set my exposure to f4 at 1/60 of a second, and I am shooting away. Of course the students know I'm in the room, but the Minolta 7s does not draw attention to itself. After a few minutes, I concentrate on capturing good photographs; it's quite fun!

After I have finished a couple of rolls, it will be time to develop the film and see if this pushing thing really works. To do that properly, I must extend my developing time to compensate for the film's two-stop underexposure. Fortunately, the Unicolor C-41 kit that I use has clear instructions for push-processing. For a two-stop push, I will need to extend my developing time by a factor of 1.5. So, if these rolls were the first rolls to be developed with this kit, my developing time would be 3.5 minutes times 1.5, or 5.25 minutes (which works out to 5:15). Since these rolls will be the 7th and 8th rolls on this kit, I will extend the time even more.*

I will publish Part Two of this article as soon as I have photographs to show from these push rolls of ColorPlus. I really am hoping this works, as I would like to be free of my flash when shooting at school.

Happy Shooting!

* To account for the gradual depletion of the C-41 developer, I use this formula to calculate my developing time:  140 / (40-n) = developing time, where n = the number of rolls previously processed with your C-41 kit. For example, my current kit has processed six rolls, so the formula for my next roll(s) will be 140 / 34 = 4.12, which works out in minutes and seconds to 4:07 developing time. However, since my next roll(s) will be push processed two stops, I will extend the developing time as follows:  4.12 x 1.5 = 6.18, which works out to 6:11.