Why slide film

Slide film has a one-and-a-half stop range. This basically contradicts everything I ever learned in any darkroom class ever… and I have to assume these people are scanning and not printing in a darkroom. Scanning and tweaking in Photoshop probably will get more out of lost highlights and shadows, but I would not approach shooting with these larger stop ranges in mind. If you feel comfortable enough with your exposure skills, there are some great benefits to shooting slide film.

Now you can wow your friends with your technical knowledge on chemicals and stop range! Want to see more photos shot with slide film? Viewfinder Theme by Themelantic. Powered by Tumblr. When you make a contact sheet in the darkroom, you can make it lighter or darker according to what you want and what you need. When you develop a roll of slide film, you see exactly how you exposed your film - zero change due to processing and printing. Crisp, bright colors and higher contrast range.

This is probably the largest broad appeal of shooting slide film, considering all of the Photoshop actions out there designed to mimic its effects. Not only can dust damage the highly sensitive photographic emulsion, but it can also hide important details of the image. Dust is especially noticeable on scanned 35mm film because the photographic material is so small 24mmx35mm and even one dust particle can cover a large section of the slide.

Usually an air blowing tool, called a blower , or compressed air will easily remove dust. If the slides have been exposed to humid conditions, the dust might have stuck to the surface of the film.

This type of dust is more difficult to remove and you will need to use a soft brush, one intended for use on delicate surfaces, to gently brush it away. Once all dust has been removed your slides will be ready for digitisation and you can be assured you will get the best result possible. Flatbed and drum scanning technologies used to be the primary method for digitising film such as slides, however the introduction of digital cameras mean that these methods are now outdated.

Although the three scanning technologies currently coexist, servicing or technicians able to maintain options such as drum scanning are scarce. The main differences between the three technologies is the scanning time per slide. It is much quicker to use a digital camera, and it still produces a digitised image of equal if not better quality. At NZMS we digitise slides using a high-resolution digital camera attached to a stand, over a lightbox and a slide cradle.

This allows us to capture a high-quality image and ensure the digitised file accurately represents the original photograph. Cultural heritage institutions like museums, archives, and libraries often have extensive photographic collections, which can include slide film.

Digitisation of this material not only ensures preservation, but it also contributes to a common goal of increasing public engagement. Digitisation allows for the creation of online digital collections that can be remotely accessed — which is particularly relevant in the aftermath of Covid19 lockdowns.

However, it is not only institutions that benefit from digitisation, individuals with family slide collections will find it useful as well. Digitisation guarantees preservation; digital images do not deteriorate. They cannot fade, grow mould, discolour, be scratched or torn, and they are not adversely effected by acids or materials present in storage papers or plastics.

The characteristics of color slide film that are celebrated are a consequence of its high contrast and vivd saturation. The contrast yields its narrow latitude. As for pros using it, that was because the processes to reproduce color were based on slide film and the fact that the color separator could judge the color match without the presence of the photographer. The color rendering of slide film could be remarkably variable. Kodachrome, in theory was the most reliable in color as in the early days only Kodak processed the film.

In the '80s they opened up processing to independent labs. Though Kodak demanded strict adherence to their QC regimen, the fact was more variability was introduced. E-6 processes have wildly varying results depending on the chemicals used Kodak vs, non-Kodak , the preparation of solutions, Ph, time, temperature, oxidation, agitation etc.

Add to that the storage conditions of unexposed film age, temperature, atmospheric pollutants and the after exposure handling all had an effect on final results. Professional emulsions were tailored to lower saturations and more neutral renditions to ensure suitability for the reproduction of colored materials such as fabrics and pigments.

Amateur emulsions were more saturated to appeal to those shooting landscapes and non-critical subjects. When it came to printing a variety of technologies were created over the history of the medium. The most popular were making an intermediate negative or interneg and printing on reversal paper. The internegative properly made-not trivial rendered better tonality and color and was printed on regular color paper AKA Type C however the intermediate step could reduce sharpness unless one was making an enlarge intermediate such as a 4x5 negative from a 35mm original.

Reversal processes were popular as it was a simpler affair eliminating the interneg. The drawbacks being more expensive paper and a slightly more complex processing regime for TypeR. Cibachrome was popular for its vivid colors and its permanence, the latter a real problem for Type R. Cibachrome was very contrasty and unless the slide was matched well to the medium often resulted in excessively contrasty results.

Elaborate masking techniques were used by custom labs and skilled enthusiasts to reduce contrast and moderate color shifts adding to the complexity of the process. Long comment I know, but the slide film world was not all perfect color and sharp images. It was a technology that struggled with the constraints of the chemistry. Results could be splendid but achieving those results was far more than just absolute necessity of a correct initial exposure. Type R prints were not as sharp, potentially as Ciba or an excellent interneg as diffusion of the light through the thick Type R emulsion softened detail.

Yes, both exposure and color balance were critical when shooting slides no matter what they were used for. I nearly always shot color slide film when shooting color, even when I was doing it for prints. I found that my Cibachrome print colors were better than I got from negative-based color printing. However, I still needed a filter pack ok, dichro head settings in the darkroom for Cibachrome.

In fact, I vaguely recall even having a per-batch color bias for the Cibachrome material itself. Scanning old slides has been a bit of a surprise in that I've found there are often at least a couple of recoverable stops in very dark regions of a slide using HDR scanning -- they're just not tonally anywhere near where they should be, and wouldn't even be visible in normal projection.

Even my Nikon doesn't see them. I now do HDR scans using a Sony A7RII and do heavy tone mapping to bring the recovered image content back into a more correct tonal range; it really helps unblock shadows.

Scanning color slides is briefly mentioned, but processing color transparency film years ago was frequently haphazard, and resulted in film with multiple dust bunnies when the chemical soups were simply topped up and re-used professional grade processing in those days was better and particularly now is much improved.

Scanning old slides therefore requires the use of digital technology to remove dust digital ICE etc but this results in loss of definition: manual removal of dust particles in Photoshop retains definition but can require an hour for a single Kodachrome.

I always found slide film more rewarding than negative, not more difficult. The results that came back from the lab were exactly what you shot. We did do that, making the shadows very dark to print easily and now scan. It did mean that you would not burn out the highlights. I didn't like the Fuji's for this reason; strange blue's and green's. When Velvia was introduced I did a lot of test shots and it didn't start to look decent until ISO 25 using calibrated meters.

The shadow blocking was horrendous. On the other hand, I shot a lot of Fuji color neg film when the Associated Press and major newspapers began printing in color.

I really liked Reala for photographing people. I found that shooting with slide film had a lasting effect on my photography. I still use an exposure meter a lot of the time with digital to avoid "chimping", as well as making sure the image is worth it.

I used to ask myself, is the shot worth 50 cents? Simplicity, I guess we used to be very good at estimate exoposure back then. I started with an Olympus OM-1, all info was that analog meter that ranged from plus to minus. Fondly recalling when the the match needle metering from my SP was good enough, even for slide film.

I got a few pretty nice slide film shots back in college. I attended a location lighting workshop at Brooks Institute in Santa Barbara around 30 years ago. After calibrating everyone's flash meters more than a few needed correction. I think that getting exposure right in the camera is important. Particularly if you want to obtain the maximum dynamic range with a RAW file.

It's another thing altogether to waste time in post trying to fix exposure errors. Great little spot meter with a match needle exposure system. Very rare to have exposure issues. I shot countless rolls of KC too. It was an amazing film. I had enough to sustain my interest. I also shot a lot of K64 when I was a hobbyist in the late 70s-early 80s. But when I started doing freelance assignments for magazines I had to adopt E6 to speed-up the turnaround time.

When USA Today sparked the move to color in newspapers, I added bricks of color negative film to my freezer. But I still preferred K64 and used it until Kodak discontinued production. My Kodachrome slides from 50 years ago are still vibrant with no fading at all, and with exceptional high resolution. Agfachrome 50 was great for its reds and clear blues and had good resolution.

Ektachrome 64 and faded somewhat and were not as sharp as Kodachrome. Some of the best work I ever did. Digital makes it easy and free to take lots of pictures and frees you from the discipline of carefully composing and thinking. But it makes it hard to make photos worth keeping. I am trying now to get back in the mode of careful work to make photos that others might want to see 50 years from now - or even next year.

With cell phone cameras today, these are shared immediately but no one looks at them a year later. Yes, Kodachrome from the same period as its E-6 rivals was and is considerably more long lived. That's because, as I understand it, Kodachrome was actually a black and white emulsion, to which very stable dyes were applied during a very long and complex process.

E-6 film has less stable colorants embedded in the emulsion that are activated by the chemical reactions caused by the E-6 chemical processing.

The E-6 film dyes faded much more easily but the E-6 process was simpler, faster and cheaper, so it eventually survived while Kodachrome didn't. Sad, but it's the way of the world. In my later years of shooting transparency film for publication for clients, I installed an E-6 processing "line" in my studio to take as much control of the image outcome as I could. It was an interesting experience and helped my work come out better and faster. My experience is that Kodachromes keep well in the dark, but they can fade very badly if you leave them where daylight can get at them.

Yes, of course, all films, and prints as well, will fade when constantly exposed to light. Given equal exposure, Kodachrome will fade more slowly, but it will fade and change color, sooner or later. All film and prints that you want to preserve, should be kept in the dark, in a cool dry space and not in direct contact with any acidic or out-gassing materials example, an acid free carboard box , whenever possible.

Of course, prints for display can't, by definition, be kept in the dark, but they should at least be kept behind glass or UV blocking stable and non out-gassing clear plastic, with an airspace between the glass or plastic surface and the surface of the print, and in places where only indirect sunlight hits them.

When I got into photography as a hobby my budget was very limited, so I treated every 35mm frame like it was a 4x5. The only roll of film I ever lost was a 36 exposure K64 that went to Kodak for processing circa It had 2 months of what I knew were great shots from the eastern Sierra.

After that every roll had a frame of ID information and an exterior address label. I also started spreading shoots across multiple rolls as insurance. Even when I went pro in the late 80s and had motor drives on my 35mm cameras, I tended to shoot less than my colleagues but of course I had to speed-up enough to satisfy the picture editors. I didn't change my shooting style when I made the move from film to digital. I'm amazed at how many images people capture these days when we typically delivered the goods shooting a fraction of their frames.

National Geographic stories being a notable exception. Those were the days. Kinda miss them, even tho it was very expensive and that wait to get the rolls devopled and sent back. I rarely had any unused film by the end of the trip. It was such a treat to watch the first slide show! I don't understand. You can get an image on a piece of plastic?

How does the camera print anything on plastic? Or is that done in a "lab". I don't get it. You received your processed slides in a box. Colour was what you expected to see. You viewed them with a light table, a slide viewer, or a projector. And then probably never looked at them again! Two of the, many, advantages of digital are accessibility and ease of viewing. The film itself is changed by the chemical development process so that the colours you photographed turns transparent hence the name "transparencies" that was also used for slide film and can be projected on a large screen by shining light through it with a projector.

The mounted slides is the cut up film itself. You can of course also project the slide onto light sensitive paper, thus creating a coloured photograph. Most movies you see in the theater are in reality just a whole lot of slides pushed fast through a projector. I am assure you I looked at the slides often. They were the keystone of my business. First sales were important.

Residual sales were just as important. Speaking of residual sales, my best experiences with that was when I was shooting mostly for Time-Life, Inc. Since I was based in Michigan, they called me to shoot mostly in the Midwest, but even occasionally elsewhere, even in NYC one time.

Regardless, at the time, Time-Life had their own stock photo department, and if you shot for them, your work automatically went into their sales bin. What was great was, they never let you know about a sale until you received the check in the mail.

To anyone else here who ever worked for them then, remember those long thin tan film envelopes with templates for caption information?

Plus my major newspaper clients U. I licensed many images for college textbook publishers when I was shooting professional theatre. Every time they published a new edition often annually it required a new license and another check. Here's a shout-out to fotoQuote Thanks Cradoc for helping me dramatically increase my licensing income.

My first sale after purchasing the software was for around 5 times more than I had previously accepted for the same usage terms. I retired comfortably at 60 I'll be 67 in May. It's a crying shame that younger photographers don't have the range of decent-paying income options we had in the golden years of editorial photography.

And after testing it on various cameras I never use it. Center-weighted and spot are faster and more accurate in my experience. Matrix Metering has its own idiosyncrasies, so if you are going to use it you need to learn how to compensate for those variables. And MM often works slightly differently depending on the camera, one of the things Thom Hogan covers in his excellent Nikon camera guides.

In the article I missed the mentioning of the color randomness of slide films. As an amateur, I shot about slide films from to about The reason I suddenly stopped with slides was only one: the color cast was always quite different. Maybe I should have bought professional films out of the fridge but that's knowledge I have now. I scanned several thousands of my slides during the last few years and found some slides survived very well and others didn't, for no obvious reason.

I really like digital, because compared to slides it's me who's in control. I shot many hundreds of rolls of Kodak and Fuji slide films of all types, and sold thousands of rolls to customers, and never saw anything I'd call random color casts. Theoretically, the refrigerated versions of film were more consistent batch to batch, but I never saw that in real results.

As the article says, film is balanced for a particular color temperature, so you can see warm or cool color casts, depending on light conditions. Maybe that's what you're referring to?

But in similar light, the slide films I shot all looked pretty consistent from roll to roll--i. Poor processing can also cause color casts in film. That some of your film has deteriorated over time might be an indication of processing issues. My slides -- processed in pro labs and stored in archival sheets -- have not deteriorated at all since the s Kodachrome, Ektachrome, and Fujichrome.

My KC lasted. And I stopped using Agfa. Difference was processing. Here a lot of Agfa CT I really liked this film, when the colors were right. In hindsight Kodachrome 64 always was worth the double price. Ektachrome is fading out after all those years. The worst were the re-spooled movie stocks sold by the likes of Seattle Filmworks. You would buy a roll and send it back to them for processing there was an anti-halination layer that had to be removed.

Some of my slides from the mids on this stock are now basically just shades of red. My Kodachromes and Agfachromes from the same time are still good. I even have some 4x5 Kodachromes of my father from not taken by me that are fine. More than a few pros I knew would buy large quantities of slide film of the same batch that they tested for color and exposure. They tended to work in fashion or product industries. Most film stored in a freezer would keep for years except for high-speed film that could go bad within months due to background radiation.

The more expensive professional emulsions were more consistent because of tighter production controls and they were always refrigerated. When I started using E6 film for assignments I FedExed stuff overnight to a pro lab in a city miles from my rural home base. It was worth every penny. And anyway the clients were footing the bill.

That lab didn't make a single mistake during the 20 years I used them. The slides came back clean as a whistle. According to my film files, E-6 fades less than C and suffer less colored spots. But if the final bath is omited, E-6 will acquire a yellow tinge after 25 years.

From my experience, slide film development is not "slightly" more expensive than C It's about twice as much. It really depends I guess. I recently shot a few Provia rolls in format and was pleasantly surprised when my local photo store told me it would only cost around 7 EUR or so per roll to develop. I feared the worst how many rolls do the lab still develop, how fresh are the processing baths?

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Login Register. Best cameras and lenses. A 's magazine ad for Kodak's various lines of slide film. Image courtesy of Nesster Slide film, otherwise known as positive, reversal or transparency film and occasionally as 'E-6' for its development process , was the choice of 'pro' shooters back in the pre-digital film photography days. Climbers approach the alpenglow-illuminated summit of California's Mt. Kodak Ektachrome VS Photo: Dale Baskin An Oversimplified Explanation of Color Slide Film Works Color slide film works much like color print film , with layers of emulsions, each sensitive to a different color of light, and chemicals called dye couplers.

Types of Color Slide Film Photo: Dale Baskin Because slide film cannot be color-corrected in processing, the film must be balanced for the type of light you are shooting. Because slide film cannot be color-corrected in processing, the film must be balanced for the type of light you are shooting Among daylight films, there are notable variations in color rendition.

Developing Color Slide Film Just as it is pricier than color print film to buy, color slide film is often but not always slightly more expensive to process. Slide film has very little exposure latitude, meaning the exposure must be spot on to get a good image Like color negative film, color slide film can be developed at home using an E-6 processing kit. Training climbers to extricate themselves from a glacial crevasse on Mt.

Rainier's Nisqually glacier. Tags: analog , film , film-beginners-guide , film-friday , film-photography. View Comments Comments All AmynNasser Time to bring out all that film from my archives which goes back some 40 years!! Zograf Sorry to hear about your scanner failing. AmynNasser Interesting article. Trevor Sowers Slide film encapsulates my love of photography more than anything else. Petka I do not get it? Easier, cheaper, much better quality.

Photog74 "the speed of slide film is specified as an ISO a. ADW59 Used to use Velvia , I liked the limiting factor; you only have 12 frames, make the best f them. FujifilmXT3 Been there done that. Never again. Medium format digital is so far superior not worth the bother. Ryborg This is correct. The author must be inexperienced. Photog74 Consumer grade lab scanners from Fujifilm, Kodak and Noritsu do indeed get it right most of the time.

Alan2dpreview Isn't the issue with negative color scanning is you don't really know what you have whereas with slide film you know immediately if you got the exposure right. Copal Fit fmian: of likes don't need to be a differentiator, but I would think about it if I were you in this discussion: so far you have zero Copal Fit Thanks for mentioning Negadoctor - I started using Darktable but was unaware about this function until now!

Nerdferkel I do kinda miss slide film. Just grab a roll and enjoy it You would help others to keep it alive! Scott Eaton Color slide film nor color neg film "is corrected in processing".

A fine Weekend, and good Light. Alan2dpreview I shot with Kodachrome before Ektachrome and Velvia. Scott Eaton Kodachrome may have lacked dynamic range and had the lattitude of a razor blade and had proprietary processing, but it had better midtone detail over Kodak's sludgy E-6 emulsions.

Better than all of them: Fuji Provia Hands down, the best transparency I worked with. Alan2dpreview I've been shooting Velvia 50 for decades, still do in 6x7 format and 4x5". McArchive E-3 was fun! Scott Eaton Since most labs ran Kodak control strips the only way to get maximum quality from Fuji E-6 was to manually process it. Lan To me the single biggest advantage of slide film was that the labs couldn't mess with the colours of my images.

Lan nextSibling: I'd attributed it to poor training and lack of care; but your suggestion makes more sense.