Velvia and Ektachrome 100GX are well-suited to photography of raindrops on roses; for whiskers on kittens Astia 100F or, if print film is acceptable, Portra would be better. For at least another fourteen months, there's a film that works well with both subjects: Kodachrome 64.
The color balance of Kodachrome films, including Kodachrome 64, the last of the group to be discontinued, is legendary for good reason. This is the a film that manages to give healthy, better-than-realistic flesh tones and subtle earth tones yet still gives plenty of "punch" to bright, saturated objects. Clouds take on layers of detail, Arizona rock formations and petroglyphs are as one remembers them, and flowers are as bright as our thoughts of spring. Kodachrome 64 is a bit unforgiving, even for a slide film--meter for the highlights!--but has very wide six-or-seven stop dynamic range. Two to three stops of that are buried in the shadows; the level of shadow detail in a Kodachrome slide can be truly starling. The film's dynamic range, subtle tonal gradation, and sharpness conspire to give in many color shots the "texture" and "luminosity" so sought by black-and-white photographers.
Morning and evening shots are knockouts, due to Kodachrome's ability to render reds. That isn't to say that scenes in bright sunlight look bad, either. The famous green of the Paul Simon song is best at high noon, especially if one uses a polarizer, and can be black-looking in low light. I have taken photos of cacti at twilight that don't look black, albeit with he sun at my back. The degree to which technical voodoo can make a film look realistic yet punchy is indeed limited; not only are the greens good and bad at the same time, but purple--a notoriously difficult color for both analog and digital systems--can look overly blue.
Still, until processing is discontinued at the end of 2010, Kodachrome's 75th year, Kodachrome 64 remains the closest thing to the ideal traveler's film. It's warmer, punchier, and far less grainy than Kodachrome 200, and the one-and-one-third stop advantage over Kodachrome 25 can make the difference between handholding and shooting with a tripod and cable release. The difficult to find Kodachrome 40 might be a great choice for scenes with a lot of red, but requires correction filters for its tungsten balance.
If carrying a tripod is an option, Kodachrome 25 has less grain and more saturation without noticeably sacrificing realism. On its own I rarely find Kodachrome 64 lacking, but seeing them side-by-side while filing a few rolls last week, the bluer skies and brighter colors of Kodachrome 25 were apparent. It's expensive, but if not prohibitive I recommend it over Kodachrome 64 for "special" shoots.
Velvia by comparison does otherworldly, soupy sunsets, gets flesh tones of fair-skinned people terribly wrong and like most Fuji films appears to have a bluish-green cast. I consider it a special-purpose film for bright-color scenes, for example last spring it did an excellent job on a sand mandala but made a Tibetan monk look a little sunburnt. It has clear advantage in long exposures; past one second of exposure time Kodachrome 64 experiences cross-curve reciprocity failures, in principle correctable by use of filters, but these filters are very difficult to obtain. Among films on the market the closest thing to Kodachrome 64 on the market is probably the print film Ektar 100, which is considerably warmer and lacks the subtlety of gradation but also delivers accurate flesh tones and bright colors. When Kodachrome is finally gone, I'll probably shoot a mix of Ektar, Ektachrome, Portra, and Velvia; not only does nothing deliver an identical look, but there is no single replacement.
The official discontinuation of Kodachrome 64 was announced in June of 2009. The last production run has just about sold out; the easiest way to obtain fresh or freezer-kept rolls is probably though Ebay. All processing has been consolidated to Dwayne's in Parsons, Kansas. (Unexpired PK-24 and PK-36 mailers will continue to be honored through December 2009; send them directly to Dwayne's.) Processing will continue until the end of 2010, bringing an end to 75 years of color photography on film used for classic National Geographic and Arizona Highways, by Ansel Adams for his color work and William Eggleston for his groundbreaking MOMA exhibition, and for a considerable portion of color photojournalism until the mid-1990s. If you haven't shot any, try it once while you still can.
Kodachrome 64 is the ultimate descendent of the film once called "High Speed Kodachrome" because it was one and one third stops faster than Kodachrome 25, and it's not different in concept from the original subtractive-color film developed by Mannes and Godowsky ("Man and God") that quickly displaced additive-color films following its 1935 introduction by Eastman Kodak. That means, among other things, that it's fundamentally different from C41 and E6 (color print and Ektachrome-type color slide) films, which are technological descendents of early-1950s Ektachrome and more distantly the Agfacolor film introduced in 1936.
If you pick up a Kodachrome slide and examine it at a glancing angle, you will notice a "layered" appearance not shared by any other color film. E6 process films are layered, too; the fundamental difference between these and Kodachrome is that Kodachrome begins with no color couplers present in the film; these must be washed in during development one at a time, each following a re-exposure to colored light. This difference gives Kodachrome films a dark-keeping lifetime closer to that of black-and-white film than to that of ordinary color film (although other color films have been improving in this respect with time.) Kodachromes shot decades ago are almost as vivid as the day after processing; we will be able to show Kodachromes shot today to our grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
Of more import to the photographer, this difference, together with the thinness of Kodachrome emulsion, is also why Kodachrome is extremely sharp. After the discontinuation of Kodachrome 25, Kodachrome 64 was the sharpest color film on the market. When the current generation of Kodachrome 64 was introduced, it also had very low granuarity, RMS 10, second only to its slower counterpart. By today's standards, this is mediocre. According to retired Kodak engineer Ron Mowrey, following lukewarm reception of a T-grain "Kodachrome 400" during its late 1980s test run, Kodak scrapped plans to update its other Kodachrome films. Still, it's only a bit grainier than Velvia or newer Ektachrome films, and grain is noise, not resolution. If looking to compare to digital, Kodachrome 64 is said to produce images comparable to that of a 25 megapixel digital sensor. Scanning to attain that without a drum scanner is difficult; the best way to judge is to project an image. On doing so, you will also notice the analog shoulder, one of the reasons some of us haven't fully switched to digital.
The difference between E6 and Kodachrome processing also meant that Kodachrome requires a room-sized apparatus, an analytical chemist, and high volume to process consistently, whereas E6 can even be processed in a home lab by a careful amateur. The "T-lab" machine, compact but still larger than a few E6/C41 minilabs put together, supposedly delivered inconsistent results relative to the large facilities and never really took off. Undoubtedly the need to send off film and wait for its return played a role in Kodachrome's demise, as much as Velvia, digital, and the switch in the consumer market from slides to prints did.
For the professional photojournalist, that turnover makes a lot of difference, but for the recreational shooter, it's no bother at all. It certainly shouldn't be a barrier to trying one of the defining artistic media of our age if you've never done so before, nor to making the most of freezer stocks, if you have them, in shooting travel, events, or art photography in the next fourteen months. Except perhaps by Kodachrome 25, Kodachrome 64's super-realism, its ability to capture the world how we think we see it, is unmatched. Don't let the remaining rolls become useless paperweights: caputre your world.
For more information about Kodachrome, visit the Kodachrome Project website at http://kodachromeproject.com .
Color slide film Reproduces subtle color naturally Extremely fine grain and high sharpness Requires special developing process 36 exposuresMore at Amazon Marketplace
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