Pushing Portra 400 to ISO 800: Porta 400 metered at ISO 800 and pushed one stop.

I have often used Kodak Portra 800. I find the grain is acceptable in medium format and have printed 6x17 images to 20 inches and they look very clear.

The speed is great for shooting handheld in challenging circumstances. I have used it with my Fuji G617 a beast of a camera which is surprisingly easy to shoot handheld though it looks pretty ridiculous. Portra 800 works nicely because the 105mm lens has a center filter to reduce the vignetting of the lens. The center filter takes a stop of exposure however. So ISO 800 film becomes effectively ISO 400. The problem with Portra 800 is it much more expensive than Portra 400. This got me to thinking about using pushed Portra 400 instead. The internet is full of examples that looked pretty good.

Below are some examples of Portra 800 images.

Portra 800 Photos Taken with Fuji G617 (all handheld)

I set up my Mamiya 645 Pro with a roll of Portra 400 and set the film holder to ISO 800 so the meter would think it had ISO 800 film in. Essentially I am underexposing by 1 stop. I shot a roll as part of my woodland fall project.

I then sent the roll off to Peak Imaging (Sheffield UK) with instructions to push process 1 stop. They don’t charge extra for this service.

My overall impression is very positive. I find the colors to be rich and the scans to be very editable. Some of the shadow areas may suffer from some color shift due to underexposure but that could be my metering not being careful enough.

Here are a some quick crops to look at grain. In each case I tried to include underexposed shadow areas as these show the worse grain. Each crop is 630 x 630 pixels scanned at 3200 dpi on an Epson V850 scanner, no sharpening.

The grain looks comparable to the Portra 800 grain. The third crop is Portra 400 exposed and processed normally; the grain is clearly smoother. That is the trade off. So far I am convinced there are no downsides to taking Portra 400 to ISO 800 as a means of getting cheaper and more flexible film stock. After all if I just keep Portra 400 in my freezer I can choose how to shoot it on a roll-by-roll or sheet-by-sheet basis.