All posts by Thomas Pindelski

Kodachrome – the only excuse to use film

Gone, but not forgotten.

The Big Yellow God. Thus was Kodak known in the 1970s because you mailed your exposed Kodachrome slide film in a yellow mailer to Rochester, NY and time and the USPS permitting, you would get your slides back, beautifully mounted in 2″x2″ cardboard, in a yellow box, in a couple of weeks.


The Ektachrome outlier was their 160ASA/ISO speed demon!

In 1970 Kodak lost a trust busting suit which allowed only the BYG to process Kodachrome and the floodgates opened to independent processing shops who could afford the costly gear and crack the 17-step process, which included a couple of re-exposure steps to effect reversal of the image. Consonant with that old economic adage that “All control drives up price” prices crashed and Kodachrome became the most popular film on the planet. That explains the above slides lacking the Kodak imprimatur on the cardboard mount. They were processed by indie shops which had a faster turnaround.


The Kodachrome process.

While my color snapping had seen but one roll of Kodachrome exposed in Paris along with one of grain crazy Ansco/GAF’s 500, I no longer had a darkroom after taking my last TriX monochrome image and, quite frankly, I was bored to death with black and white. So why not the best? I loaded up my Leica with Kodachrome 64 (I considered the 25 ASA alternative too slow) and had at it. This was in November, 1977.


My first color image in the US. November, 1977, Anchorage, AK.


Indie Kodak processing lab, Anchorage.


Harsh and high contrast.


Kodachrome yellows and reds were to die for.


On the Natchez, Mississippi River, New Orleans.


Brennan’s, New Orleans.


Bourbon Street, New Orleans.


New Orleans.


Bergdorf’s, NYC.


NYC.

Kodachrome was a very contrasty film with unique rendering of yellows and reds. It was not especially fine grained, as these ultra-high resolution scans from my Nikon D800 disclose. At ISO 100 on the D800’s monster 36mp sensor there is zero digital ‘grain’. You only see what was stored on the film itself. No matter. They print just fine.

Leica M3 and Leicaflex SL, 50mm Summicron, Kodachrome 64, ‘scanned’ on the Nikon D800.

Film was awful. It still is.

Don’t waste your time on obsolete technologies.

For an index of all my Film related articles, click here.


All in one piece.

My film ‘scanning’ project is almost complete. You can see a video of the technique here.

Suffice it to say that this is the only efficient, high quality way of scanning a large number of film negatives or slides.

Starting on February 4, some 59 days ago, I have scanned over 164 rolls of 36 exposure monochrome film, totaling over 5,900 exposures. 2,198 or 37% of those were ‘keepers’, a high rate in an age of free imaging with vast, low cost digital storage technologies, where a 3% success rate is considered high. I spent 1-2 hours daily doing this for a total time sink of some 100 hours. That included printing the best images for my large format print albums.

To have attempted this project using either a dedicated film scanner (reasonable definition, slow) or flat bed scanner (poor definition, molasses slow) would have taken for ever and it’s simply not a good use of time. Further, the modest investment in a macro lens and illuminated film strip attachment for this project, both easily resold, is lower than any of the alternatives. And the quality of the ‘scans’ is drop dead gorgeous, more definition retrieved from 50 year old negatives than I could have possibly dreamed of.


Yellowed glassines but pristine film inside

What is good about film? Not much. All mine were developed in a Paterson System 4 developing tank, available still and little changed. What appears to be missing is the handy clip-in hose which was attached to a tap and pumped water through the reel into the bottom of the tank, displacing fixer residue and assuring permanence. You did this for 30 minutes, wasting shocking quantities of water. Why 30 minutes? Because no one new any better and, if you wanted your originals to survive, more was better than less. Maybe 5 minutes would have sufficed. We will never know.

As for scan quality, the Nikon D800 I used delivered in spades. I started using 14-bit uncompressed RAW which delivered a 75mp file. Later I switched to 12-bit lossless compressed and the quality was indistinguishable, the file size halving to 36mp. Key to the efficiency of this process was the Negative Lab Pro Lightroom plugin which automated the reversal of negative image to positive. I would do this once on the first negative frame then save the whole process as a Preset. That Preset was then set up in the LR Tethered capture dialog box, with the D800 connected by a USB cable to LR. ‘Scan’ the image and, Hey Presto!, 5 seconds later the properly reversed positive image appears in LR. LR does not allow crop settings to be saved in the Preset, but other than that the process is about as automated as it gets. I would ‘scan’ two films – 72 exposures – daily and the scanning part would take maybe 5 seconds an image.

Don’t even think of using some sort of copying attachment where the camera and film stage are physically separated. And forget about futzing with glass plates in a futile effort to keep the film as flat as possible. You will simply collect more dust and possibly Newton rings in the process. Anti-Newton ring glass? The quickest way to destroy the definition of your scanned image. I found that stopping down the 60mm Micro-Nikkor macro lens to f/13 provided adequate depth of field for edge-to-edge sharply defined grain and ISO100 means that there is no digital ‘grain’. Deny these realities and you will waste immense amounts of time framing and focusing, and many of your efforts will be duds. The hardware I used unifies the camera, the film stage/film strip holder and the included LED light source. Alignment issues are a thing of the past and auto exposure and auto focus are the bees’ knees. Camera shake? Impossible. Camera and film are one.

Which brings us to one of the worst aspects of analog film. Dust and dirt. It’s one thing to speed the scanning process to deliver a high quality image. It’s quite another to remove all the dust and hairs which bedevil the medium. Time varied but particularly dirty originals might take a minute to retouch using LR’s excellent tools for this purpose. Ugh!

Follow the above instructions and I can guarantee that really large prints from your ‘scans’ will be the order of the day, provided your originals are of good quality. Mine are.

Anyway, this whole process made me revisit some of the horrors of film. Now it’s not like there was an alternative in 1974 as no one had thought up digital imaging until the brilliant engineer Steve Sasson at Kodak came up with a prototype a year later. Kodak bungled development of the technology (“There will never be a time when film will be obsolete” said one of the brain’s trust board directors), went bankrupt in the process and a quarter century later Canon and Nikon marketed really good ‘prosumer grade’ full frame DSLRs which were almost affordable at $3,000 for the body. The Canon 5D and Nikon D700. Film died that day. These 12mp bodies remain superb, bargain priced performers to this day.

But film was genuinely awful as a recording and storage medium.

Metadata? Nope. Good luck finding that special image.

Robust, scratch and dirt free permanent image retention? Nope.

Oh! but the superior tonal range! Well, maybe cut back on the funny cigarettes.

And whatever you do, to deliver an image to the world, whether printed or on a display screen, you have to get film digitized in any case. So much for ‘analog workflow’. Use of film in today’s world is akin to three bald men arguing over a comb. An exercise in futility.

Tonal range? This is like vinyl LP nuts insisting that the quality of vinyl sound beats everything else. I challenge you to distinguish my D800 digital originals from the film version. Well, yes, you probably will. Just as the LP is distinguishable by its click, pops, scratches and poor signal-to-noise ratio, so is film distinguishable by its awful definition, low sensitivity, poor dynamic range and superabundance of dirt and scratches. It’s hard to think of a more fragile storage medium. If you are a crank who places more value on the backroom processes of developing and scanning film than on the taking of photographs, film is just the ticket.

For everyone else, film is awful. And it always was.


My last monochrome film image.
She is rushing to pick up a digital camera.

OK, Mr. Opinionated Weisenheimer, you say. So you used film for decades and maybe you know what you are speaking of, but I still want to use film. Then I suggest you cannot do better than the Nikon F100. It has auto exposure, auto focus, takes all Nikon Ai lenses and later and has auto film advance. It’s made to a high standard and can be found easily for $150 or less. This body gives you access to a large range of bargain priced Nikon lenses, MF or AF and, when you come to your senses and migrate or return to digital, those lenses will work seamlessly along with your newly found sanity.

Paris revisited

One last visit to The City of Light.

My first visit in September, 1974 had been nothing but joyful, confirming my love of all things French.

By October, 1977 my utter disillusionment with England saw a one way ticket to America in my baggage but, before boarding that Pan Am flight, a second and final visit to Paris was indicated. I simply wanted to cement the images of that gorgeous city in my mind. And in my Leica.

These are among the very last monochrome film images I ever took. Thereafter, once in America, my salary would double, my taxes would halve, my suit count would rise from one to three and my prospects would improve two orders of magnitude. And Kodachrome and the local printing place would obsolete TriX and the smelly chemicals and enlarger in the home darkroom/bedroom.



At the Arc de Triomphe


Self portrait with Leica




At the Elysée Palace, Cadillac and all




Wedding in Parc Monceau, quite possibly the most perfect public park …. after the Tuileries Gardens


Parc Monceau


At the Holocaust Museum. Appropriately spiky and threatening


At the Holocaust Museum


Café Cher(ie)


Working girl


The Venus de Milo has seen better days



Gorilla



Mailman


Train conductor


Gendarmes








If the English are a nation of animal lovers then the French are a nation of dog lovers


Pipe and pigeons

Leica M3, 35mm Summaron, TriX. What could be more perfect for street photography? All images ‘scanned’ using the Nikon D800.

The Hebrides

Rugged.

By September, 1976 I had decided that it was time to move to the New World but one last trip to the wilds of Scotland was indicated. Rugged and windswept these are very remote places in seemingly terminal population decline. And who can wonder?

The various islands are connected by ferries and I recall making some pretty rough crossings.












A crofter’s cottage on the island of Harris, where the famous tweed cloth is hand made.

Leica M3, 35mm Summaron, 50mm Summicron, 90mm Elmar and Nikon F, 28mm and 80-200mm Vivitar lenses, TriX, ‘scanned’ on the Nikon D800.

Easter Sunday

Sunny interlude.

That rarest of events in London, a sunny Sunday, brings out the crowds. And while these images were snapped at a park parade on Easter Sunday in 1976. the watchers were of greater interest than the paraders.





The three wheeler is an Invacar, a vehicle designed for invalids. Horribly unsafe, it probably created more invalids than it accepted.




Leica M3, 35mm Summaron, 50mm Summicron, TriX ‘scanned’ with the Nikon D800.