Nope, slide film is positive.

wow better go to basics.

whats the difference between negatives and positives?

different films have different sharpness, different contrast and different grain, naturally lens allso effects the contrast and sharpness, if lens isnt sharp you naturally wont get sharp pic to film either, but soft film can ruin the sharpness of the lens.

no wonder people choose to shoot digital, film is confusing!

so what's the main advantages of using film other than possibly being sharper and more fun?

The very basic difference is that a negative shows a negative image, while in a slide all the colours/tones(B+W) are as you'd have shot them.
Slide film tends to be harder to shoot, as the latitude is very narrow, but they tend to be lower ASA (meaning they're sharper) and a lot of Fuji slide film has very high colour saturation.



You can enlarge film to get bigger prints. A medium format 6x6 shot will enlarge very well, better than sub 20 MP DSLR's, the system's also cheaper. You can get much bigger sizes of film though.

This post was edited by Veilside on May 13 2009 01:08pm

Ah awesome, so slide films are usually sharper, and are positive!

So after a film has been developed, how do you get it from the film to be a big print? soz for asking loads of questions and thanks for answering them

I've never made any prints from slide film, or colour film, so I'll just answer for negative black and white film.

Ok, what you do is put the particular frame in an enlarger. An enlarger is basically a lightbulb that shines through your frame, and projects an image onto a surface.

So you set the focus, aperture, etc of the enlarger up on the surface, making sure everything looks right.

You'd then run a test strip, testing exposure lengths on a piece of paper to see which one is correct, normally you'd run it at 2 second intervals. So you'd have a piece of paper exposed at 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12 etc intervals.

Once that test strip has been developed, you see which one is correctly exposed, you set the timer up on the enlarger on the correct timing, and expose your sheet of photographic paper, which you then develop.

Bingo, you've got a print.

Wicked, so its possible to alter the exposure after the film is developed, like raw processing?

and why would you want to shoot negative over positive?

Negs are cheaper, and generally easier to expose properly, it's also quite hard to find high ASA slides, most 1600+ ASA film is negative. That and you might just prefer the look of a particular film over another, Fuji Velvia for instance, is a slide film, and you won't find any negative film that looks the way it does.

You can't alter the exposure of the film, no, it's just the exposure of the piece of photographic paper that you're changing.

Ok cool so:

Slides are expensive, but sharp - Low ASA so little grain but they don't give as much exposure wise.
Negatives are cheaper and more giving with the exposure and can be high ASA

And to get negatives to prints you basically shine a light through them then test to see which paper is the right exposure then once you've got that you run photo paper through?