Next time you take a photo - slide film
I recently was scanning 40 year old slides for a customer. The colors were vivid and rich, and the pictures amazingly clear. It reminded me of why many shot with slide film. It was common in the publishing world. For years, the signature look of National Geographic was due in part to the use of Ektrachrome and Kodachrome. F1 Magazine uses Fujichrome film, which delivers very vivid colors. But my favorite, the classic warm tone of countless photos, especially glamour and product photos - Kodachrome.
Because of both the longevity and the tonal range of Kodachrome colors, Kodachrome has been used by professional photographers like Alex Webb and Steve McCurry. McCurry’s famous image of Sharbat Gula, the “Afghan girl” portrait taken in 1984 for the National Geographic, was taken with Kodachrome.
When shot with a high quality lens, a 35 mm Kodachrome slide will hold detail equivalent to 25 or more megapixels of image data[citation needed].
The digital scanners available today breath new life into the possibilities of this film. They are a natural for scanning rather than negatives, which are nearly impossible to sort through. Don’t want to take that expensive digital camera somewhere? Get an old vintage film camera, now available quite reasonably, and drop some slide film into it. I still have a Nikon FM2N with manual focus lenses that are excellent workhorses. I also have a Konica S2 with a very crisp lens. Unfortunately, the meter has finally failed on the S2, but I may just get a handy meter or use the Sunny 16 rule outdoors and bracket some shots. For less than $50, the quality of the images can hardly be beat. And if my kayak rolls, well, more sentimental loss than monetary.
Stuck in a rut with your photography? Shooting with slide film will make you think a bit. Overexposed slide film has a distinctive look. The movie Three Kings look is due to the use of Ektrachrome:
In addition, Russell shot the film on Ektachrome slide photography stock, and used the bleach bypass process, both to reproduce “the odd color of the newspaper images [of the Gulf War].”
Print film is more suited to snapshots, as it is more forgiving of exposure error. With slide film, exposure changes of 1/2 stop can effect color balance of the image. However, because the machines that develop the film are not doing any kind of correction at all, slide film does give the photographer total control over his image.
While I was looking through old boxes of photos, I realized too that slides are easy to store, compared to the stacks of prints, some near some far from their negatives. This sunset was shot 15 years ago on Lake Huron. Sunsets are spectacular on the Great Lakes. Scanned with an Epson Perfection 2450 transparency scanner.
Lake Huron Sunset - Kodachrome, September 1991
