Wedding photographers had a hard time with dark-skinned subjects. Color film was fine-tuned for specific matter back in the day, and the two common varieties available were (1) optimized to make light-skinned people look nice, and (2) optimized to make vivid colors. These two approaches were at odds, because anything which made vivid colors would exaggerate skin blemishes.
Films in category #2 sometimes worked better with dark-skinned subjects, because these films tended to be more neutral overall, but this was a bit of a crapshoot. Anyone shooting light-skinned subjects had an easier time, because they had films which were purpose-built to make their job easier.
Examples of film pairs in category #1/#2: Kodak 160NC / 160VC, Fuji NPS 160 / NPC 160. Maybe Fuji Astia/Provia. Velvia 50 fell solidly in category #2. There are also films that don’t really fit in either category, like Kodak 100UC. Digital cameras contain processing that makes many of the same tradeoffs as film, it’s just that you have a lot more flexibility to make adjustments on the digital side of things.
Designing cameras to be “neutral” or “accurate” is not really an option, when it comes to color, due to the sheer complexity of the problem. This is a lot more complicated than just thinking about RGB or XYZ. You get to choose between different inaccurate options, which are each optimized for some specific set of use cases.
Most wedding photographers aren't using film. Film is a very small niche these days. These days you shoot in raw with a digital camera, vary the exposure if needed, and set the white balance as needed when editing. If you know how to use your equipment you shouldn't have any problem taking photos of people of any skin color, not even the lightest person next to the darkest.
They were using film “a long time ago”. Wedding photographers have only been shooting digital for 20 years or so.
Early digital had a somewhat poor dynamic range. It’s gotten better, but it was really rough in the early days.
> If you know how to use your equipment you shouldn't have any problem taking photos of people of any skin color, not even the lightest person next to the darkest.
This statement seems so obviously and fundamentally wrong that I must be missing something. I meet enough photographers that know how to use their equipment, but have never taken a decent photograph in their life, except one or two exceptions which appear to be accidents. This seems like a very natural and understandable thing to me—there’s a lot to painting besides understanding how to use brushes and paint, and there’s a lot to building a house besides knowing how to use a nailgun and circular saw. There’s a lot more to programming than knowing how to use your compiler.
Maybe I’m missing the meaning here, because it doesn’t make any sense to me.
> These days you shoot in raw with a digital camera, vary the exposure if needed, and set the white balance as needed when editing.
That’s the first week of photography 101. Have you taken more advanced photography courses? Have you ever taken a photograph of a dark-skinned subject, wearing a pure white dress, and then printed it out? My personal experience is, that once you print your photos out (which is normal for wedding photos), and get some people with an experienced eye to look at them and give them a critique, you start to develop an appreciation for how understanding your equipment & process is just the barrier for entry to the field, and it makes you a novice.
Let me tell you—it is not trivial to make the picture show a flattering image of both the dark skin, and the white dress, with the delicate details in both. You need to know a lot more than just how to use your equipment. It is especially difficult if you are not in control of the lighting.
The raw workflow is nice, but your raw file goes through a lot of processing to turn into a viewable image, and many of the stock presets are modeled after the way film does it. You’re not really escaping the problem, in any sense, by using raw.
All I can say is that neutral color negative films have more than enough range for a black person in a white dress, and any wedding photographer who had too hard a time nonetheless would soon find themselves no longer photographing black weddings.
I must emphasize that there are no “neutral” color negative films. There are just films optimized for different use cases.
Once you dive into the sensitometry of how color films work, it becomes apparent that everything is a tradeoff. You have three light-sensitive layers, and you get to control their contrast curves, and you control their spectral response with sensitizing dyes. The physics and chemistry of light-sensitive materials imposes some constraints on the spectral responses of the different layers (which, if you think about it, explains why the different layers are always stacked in the same order, across different types of film).
Some films are advertised as “natural colors”, like Kodak 160NC, but if you dive into it, you realize that there is no such thing as “natural colors”, there is just a certain look you get with a certain film in certain conditions.
It’s not like it’s impossible for wedding photographers to shoot dark-skinned subjects at a wedding, the point is:
1. There are some difficulties inherent to the problem,
2. Your equipment (film or digital) is not configured out of the box to take good pictures of dark-skinned people.
A lot of work was put into films and digital cameras to make light-skinned people look good. It’s something people care about, and various companies invested money and made it happen. It will also take work to make pictures of dark-skinned people as easy, and there are still a lot of equipment and photographers out there who are bad at it.
Films in category #2 sometimes worked better with dark-skinned subjects, because these films tended to be more neutral overall, but this was a bit of a crapshoot. Anyone shooting light-skinned subjects had an easier time, because they had films which were purpose-built to make their job easier.
Examples of film pairs in category #1/#2: Kodak 160NC / 160VC, Fuji NPS 160 / NPC 160. Maybe Fuji Astia/Provia. Velvia 50 fell solidly in category #2. There are also films that don’t really fit in either category, like Kodak 100UC. Digital cameras contain processing that makes many of the same tradeoffs as film, it’s just that you have a lot more flexibility to make adjustments on the digital side of things.
Designing cameras to be “neutral” or “accurate” is not really an option, when it comes to color, due to the sheer complexity of the problem. This is a lot more complicated than just thinking about RGB or XYZ. You get to choose between different inaccurate options, which are each optimized for some specific set of use cases.