Color negative photography An in-depth look at the Kodak Portra film family

The three Kodak Portra films are without a doubt the mostpopular choicefor analog photographers working in color. Coming in the speeds of ISO 160, 400 and 800, these films offer a professional level of image quality for even the most demanding applications. While conceived asportrait films, they are also widely used in fashion, commercial, lifestyle and fine-art landscape photography. If you see a high quality editorial shot on film today in 2022, the likelihood that it was shot on Portra is high. However, beyond Kodak's data sheets (which are somewhat of a riddle in themselves.), the information on Portra found online seems ratherunreliable. Results vary greatly – because everyone has theirown workflow, and because themany variablesat play make comparisons difficult to carry out. This is where this course comes in: offering adetailed, in-depth analysisof the three films and how they respond to under- and overexposure using acolor checkerandgray cardas a reference point. There's a portrait setup as well as a landscape one, to really evaluate the film's performances. As a bonus, there's acomparison to digitaland we also look at someanalog C-printsof all three films to compare them with the findings from the scans.