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Hey!
I am in early stages of prep for an experimental music video where the director and I are keen to try a bleach bypass. Do you have any advice on how to expose 35mm film accounting for this development process? I’ve read online about under exposing 1 or 2 stops to control the increased contrast in the highlights and preventing them from becoming too blown out, but could the reverse not also be true as you get very constasty blacks with this process? We want rich and dense blacks so I’m thinking of only slgihtly under exposing to preserve some detail and control my highlights in my lighting plan to avoid them becoming too harsh.
Any tips or advice for exposing and utilising this development process would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks
James
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Skipping the bleach step leaves silver where there is color dye density, so if done to the negative, the highlights get denser (hotter) and if done to a print, the shadows get denser (darker).
So it is not unusual to underexpose by a stop when doing it to the negative to avoid too much overexposure in the highlights. Black level is a digital setting in digital color-correction. The only issue is how much shadow detail you want if you set black to zero.
I know that underexposing is generally suggested but I have not ever followed that rule. I suspect that is because, when I use bleach bypass, I usually want that stretched highlight and/or deeper shadow. Otherwise, why use it?
Thanks you for that clarification! I was getting a bit muddled about the differences between the technique for the neg and print!
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