At 22:41 12/16/01, Morgan Sparks wrote:
You either love Kodachrome or you don't. If you want "nice" colors,
stay away from it. But it comes closest to what my eye/brain
sees. I guess I "see" in Kodachrome. I sure don't "see" in any E-6
palette!
[snip]
I must fall into this group too . . . with color being closer to the
"reality" my brain records and recalls than any of the E-6 films. Provia
100F comes closest. I've never experienced the fabled "magenta problem" or
"Kodachrome sky" through dozens of K-64 rolls. I have experienced looking
at local subject material under similar conditions afterward to find the
K-64 faithfully rendered it. I tried E100S and E100VS. E100VS was the
worst offender, but neither render color as faithfully. The clincher is
the red barn and other out-buildings on my aunt's farm, a place I
frequent. I haven't found an E-6 (E100S, E100VS, Provia, Astia, etc.) that
renders the red faithfully. K-64 does. Same with sky tones. E100S
creates a very pleasant blue and E100VS will sieze any blue in the sky and
make it very, very blue, but neither match the paler blue of actual sky.
What someone uses depends on what is desired. Some want an "idealized"
image or one that leaps off the light table like water on a hot
griddle. Others want extreme color accuracy. The beauty of chromes is a
wide range among Kodak, Fuji and Agfa in contrast, saturation and color
rendition/accuracy. Something I never found in color negative. The
consumer stuff is general purpose, idealized for what the mainstream "Joe
Consumer" perceives a photograph should render. With rare exception the
pro stuff is geared for wedding and portraiture. Desirable for that, but
not necessarily for everything. Combine that with all the variability
consumer labs produce when printing it, and it's the reason I abandoned
color negative for all but a couple of applications (for which I use the
pro films and processing).
If nothing else, discussion about Kodachrome versus Velvia and other
chromes some time ago caused me to look, *really* look, at the world and
work very hard to switch off the "brain filters" that affect perception and
recall. Started doing this even when there was no camera at hand. The
result was astounding. I started noticing all manner of things including
how humidity, general air quality, season, and sun position all affect how
everything is illuminated outdoors.
The Qualex lab that handles mine is somewhere in Minnesota . . . at least
that's what I've been told. They've done other things such as: mounting
them backwards in the new plastic mounts, not heat sealing the cardboard
mounts completely, etc. These are annoyances that can be fixed (after
calling Qualex to complain), but they never have botched the processing or
scratched the transparencies.
Someone mentioned projection life in another post . . .
IIRC, it's about half that of Ektachrome. Both have single digit *hours*
of projection life before a 5hift in fade/color occurs. YMMV depending
on intensity of the projection lamp. Anyone doing continuous or very
frequent projection of a slide show should use dupes, *never* the
originals. That applies to all E-6 and all K-14 transparencies!
-- John
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