Choose Kodak Portra Films for natural skin tones, ideal colour, and finer grain in every situation. Day or night, studio or location, candid or posed, KODAK PROFESSIONAL PORTRA Films deliver: When Kodak introduced this film, they heavily branded and marketed it as being fantastic for scanning. Indeed, there probably isn’t a single time where I hated the scans I got from this film. Of course, scanning is a far more technical process and many of us who scan know this isn’t always so straightforward. Outdoors with a flash bounced off of a wallThis entire session was done with the Sigma 85mm f1.4. As you can see, the flash output really helps here due to adding more daylight white balanced output to the scene.

Kodak Portra 400 is a film bound to not disappoint you–especially if you can know and understand what you’re going to be getting beforehand. To do that, I really recommend shooting with your digital camera at ISO 400 and with daylight white balance. Here’s a video we did with tips on how to make the most of it. Kodak Portra 400 is an ISO 400/27° daylight-balanced professional colour negative films introduced in 1998 and made originally for portrait and wedding applications. Like Portra 160, the film was formerly available in “Natural Color” (NC) and “Vivid Color” (VC) variations, before being updated in 2010, when both were replaced with “New Portra”.There’s not much to say about the image qualities Portra brings to your street photography that wasn’t covered in the last section. The cleanness, sharpness, contrast, and muted colours just work.

If you have a camera or photography shop near you that keeps a good selection of film, they should really have some Portra 400. The only reason they wouldn’t is that they’ve sold out. It comes in a 5-roll box but any shop worth their salt should let you buy single rolls from open boxes too. It’s the same attributes that make it good for both groups; the flexibility, the reliability, and the consistency it brings with its image quality and qualities. Kodak films do tend to give your photographs a warmness, especially when compared to typical Fujicolor offerings. Portra 400 is no different in that sense, and I think it’s that warmness combined with the more muted colours that brings it so many fans. So if you’re looking for a gorgeous color film for prints or digital scans, and if you’re looking for a film that can handle almost any shooting situation without compromising image quality, Portra 400 just may be the film for you. It’s purpose-built to make gorgeous images of people, and will happily forgive the learning photographer’s occasional mistake. If there is a downside, and there always in this hobby so full of compromise, it’s that it’s a bit pricey. Still, the results are unique enough that you won’t be able to get that Portra look with any other film, and its sheer quality makes it worth the cost. It works because nothing in the image is overdone, yet nothing is bland either. I assume, since I never shot them, that it’s like they took the differing attributes of the NC and VC versions and somehow got them to work together.

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PMA - Kodak Intros Portra 800, Improves Film Characteristics" (Press release). AllBusiness. February 17, 2006 . Retrieved 2009-10-27. Kodak Professional Portra 400-speed colour negative film" (Press release). ePHOTOzine. 25 March 2008 . Retrieved 2009-10-27. Now here it is with ceiling lights (typical offices) and a Zeiss 25mm f2 lens. Overexposing here really helped give the film more needed light in a situation like this. For better or worse, a lot of hobbyist film shooters want a certain vintage look. With its sunny feel and colours and contrast that enhance a scene without making it unrealistic, Portra seems to deliver exactly what they want. You might think a film designed for shooting portraits and weddings and the like would be a bit sterile for street photography. In my opinion, that would be a wrong assumption.