Kodak Portra 400

Walk into any wedding shooter's bag, any New York portrait studio that still loads 120, and Portra 400 is what falls out first. Kodak reformulated the stock in 2010 with finer grain than the original Portra 400NC and a softer skin response than the 400VC; the result is the most forgiving color negative on the market, with about a stop of usable underexposure and four or five stops of overexposure before color shifts get strange. You can overexpose by two stops and the highlights hold. You can rate it at ISO 200 in shade and call it a day.

The signature is creamy magentas and yellows with restrained blues, which is why it photographs people so well and water so flatly. The look matters in fine-art portrait work too: large-format shooters keep loading Portra in 8x10 for editorial portraiture because no other color negative scans this cleanly with skin still reading as skin, and most of Alec Soth's Magnum portrait work since the early 2010s has been on it. Wedding photographers rate it down a stop almost universally.

Where it underperforms: scenes that need true blue. Pool water comes back gray. Clear daylight skies read flat. That is the cost of skin that always looks alive.

Box speed is 400. The reciprocity exponent of 1.10 means a five-second meter reading needs about a half stop of correction past one second; Zone Light Meter applies that automatically. Available in 35mm, 120, and 4x5 / 8x10 sheets, which is what keeps it in working pros' workflows.