A happy accident – overexposing Portra 160

Recently I put a roll of Portra 160 through my Canon FTb, a camera which I hadn’t used for a while, as I’ve been shooting mostly medium format. I’ve sold most of my Canon FD lenses so the only one I have left is a 50mm f1.8. The FTb hasn’t been put up for sale because it has a dent in the pentaprism and the meter doesn’t work, so it wouldn’t fetch much on eBay.

The film roll lasted through a trip to Allenbanks, to Durham Botanical Gardens, and to Alnwick Castle, accompanied by a Sekonic Twinmate exposure meter.

The “accident” became obvious once I’d developed the film, as the negatives were very dense, indicating overexposure. Once they were scanned, I could see that they all had very narrow depth of focus, and yet I had been shooting, most often, at f11. I went to check that the lens was stopping down correctly, and indeed it was stuck at f1.8.

I transferred the lens to a Canon FX body, fired the shutter a few times, and the lens returned to normal. But the question was, could I produce some useable images from these overexposed negatives?

 

Detail of a wooden statue at Durham Botanical Gardens

I think the answer was yes, but of course the viewer can decide for themselves. Portra is legendary for it’s ability to withstand over-exposure (and under-exposure, to a lesser degree).

This one was probably the most overexposed – five stops over

 

I really like the backgrounds produced by shooting at f1.8. I know that others rave about wide-aperture shooting, but as I mainly shoot landscapes rather than portraits, I’ve not done much of that till now. In fact I used to own three different Canon 50mm f1.4 lenses but never used them deliberately at full aperture.

Artwork in Durham Botanical Gardens

The camera used for this session

After this happy accident, I’m going to try to include more wide-aperture images. I’ll probably do this with the 110mm f2.8 lens on my Mamiya RZ67 – f2.8 on medium format produces about the same depth of field as f1.4 on 35mm, and I’ll have the advantage of the bigger negative size.