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Going back to film - what's left to use?


sunbird

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Going back to film for a while.

 

Having looked back at the first results I shot with my M6 a few years ago, they have so much more depth and warmth than anything I have shot on M8 (purchased 6 months after M6). I was shooting Kodachrome - colours / tones just amazing.

 

Q. What's the state of play with transparency 35mm these days? I'm aware of Kodachrome and Sensia being discontinued. Is the writing on the wall for 35mm colour transparency film?

 

Cheers

Chris

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Yes :(

However currently you can still obtain the superb Fujifilm Pro transparency emulsions. (Provia, Astia, Velvia) I think that the Provia 100F is an extremely fine choice for many purposes.

Depending on where you are they can be very expensive vs. the consumer emulsions.

You need a high quality scanning solution to take advantage of the quality obviously (and firstly a reliable high quality processor to develop it for you).

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THere's a ton of good films left to shoot. While it's true that the industry is widely predicting the now-foreseeable end of E6 processing, there are -- as others have said -- still great films out there, including Fuji's Provia, *the* most pushable film next to Tri-X, but increasingly expensive.

 

On the other hand, lots of great and very good colour print films including Fuji (virtually any of them, really, including the excellent value consumer line, Superia), Kodak Portra (both in the existing and the newly reformulated versions). And then there's more B&W neg film than you can shake a stick at, including Tri-X, all the Ilford films (including the wonderful C41 processing XP2 Super), theFuji B&Ws....

 

And many of these films engineered to a level that would have been merely a dream twenty or thirty years ago...

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David I assume you're talking Astia 100F? Also - nothing wrong with a bit of grain!

 

kai

 

Well spotted, the 1000F with invisible grain would be novel; an inadvertent extra 0! I'd prefer to avoid grain myself, and big blow-ups on Astia appear as grainless as digital. There appears to be plenty of film still in stock via mail order from B&H in NYC -- a very good source.

 

100G has more saturated colors. A lot depends on processing and scanning. A projected slide is still unbeatable.

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Thanks for the replies...

 

(As said in my earlier post I had a short time where I was shooting transparency film on an M6 before being tempted by the M8)

 

Thinking about it from a different angle, is there any reason to shoot transparency over negative film given that the end result isn't necessarily going to be projected or printed as in the conventional analogue way? My desire to revisit film is for the depth and 'warmth' that colours are rendered. Perhaps those results could be achieved using negative film / process and scan.

 

Chris

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Projection is fun, but even if you don't, slide film has some advantages:

 

- archiving: easier to find and view slides in plastic sleeves than orange-hued negatives.

 

- what you see is what you get. Easier to match original against scanned version.

 

- easier to scan (maybe)

 

- richer colors, clarity, luminosity, contrast (but subjective).

 

- price, maybe, probably close.

 

It's worth trying several films to see which you prefer. For example, Kodak E100G, Fuji Astia 100F (slides), Kodak Ektar 100, Fuji Pro 400H (print).

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