Reacting to something Mani said the other day: if you shoot color film, and you have a favorite color film, then that film is the best color film, regardless of what somebody else thinks. Some materials just "mesh" well with our own way of seeing and yield their gifts every time we use them. If you can identify a film as "yours," you're one of the lucky ones.
MOO*.
That's all. Just wanted to say that.
Mike
*My opinion only
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Featured Comments from:
SteveW: "I agree, there is no "best." Only favorites, that we decide upon for one reason or another. This is contrary to our online culture with all the "best of" and "top ten" lists and articles and reviews, etc. Hey, lists are fun, but they're not scripture."
Geoff Wittig: "That was certainly my experience. I struggled to learn Kodachrome and finally managed to get decent results with K64 under a narrow range of conditions. I briefly flirted with Velvia which could yield striking results with relatively subdued subjects in dead calm winds and soft overcast lighting...but a clown show with fall color. With color print film I was always at the mercy of the mini-lab, with quality levels all over the map. I finally bonded with Fuji's Provia 100F, which was quite usable under mid- to low-contrast lighting. In particular it scanned very nicely on the Minolta high-resolution slide scanner I used to get images into Photoshop for inkjet printing, and its color rendering was rich enough without Velvia's acid-trip saturation.
"But once I saw the 'good enough' files from my first DSLR, I never looked back, gladly saying goodbye to the tedious process of scanning slides and dust-spotting in Photoshop with the clone tool. The steady decline in quality of film processing (with increasing density of dust and grit spots on the slides) late in the film era made it that much easier to walk away."
Alas Fuji stopped making Reala a while back. Nothing else like it and never will be again. You could buy it for stupid cheap in supermarket checkouts yet it was better than the expensive "professional" stuff from Kodak in the fridge at the camera store.
And, most importantly to me, it actually rendered my Vietnamese son's skin tones correctly, something no Kodak film has ever done without massive hand correction in postprocessing.
I pretty much only shoot Ilford XP2 Super in 120 anymore because what little color that's left is ugly or expensive or both.
Posted by: William Lewis | Tuesday, 26 November 2024 at 02:48 AM
Fuji 400 Superia, in the '90s, worked a treat for me. Very forgiving film, lovely colours (to me). Nothing has come close since.
Your mileage will undoubtedly vary.
Posted by: Andrew Lamb | Tuesday, 26 November 2024 at 06:04 AM
In my day Kodachrome was and still is the best color film. A close second was Fujifilm. Leave it to the Japanese to try and outdo the iconic American color film.
Posted by: Bill Giokas | Tuesday, 26 November 2024 at 09:15 AM
This elevates my original comment above the lowly 'Featured' status (which I can now look down on with haughty disdain). It became its very own blogpost!
But seriously, I can sense some irritation in the response to my (unnecessarily provocative) post about Kodachrome.
My (hopefully constructive) point remains: very few young photographers consider Kodachrome relevant to their film-shooting these days, other than as a historical artifact with a 1950s vibe. And if the goal is to engage active film users to the blog, then nostalgia about long-discontinued film-stocks maybe isn't the most effective approach.
If Kodachrome looks like 1955 NYC, then Portra embodies the 2020s - especially that over-exposed, pastel look that even spills over into a large proportion of 'film-look' Lightroom presets.
My opinion only, of course.
Posted by: Mani | Tuesday, 26 November 2024 at 10:42 AM
The color film I miss the most is Ektar 25. Lovely rich colors without going into either the Velvia or the Kodachrome side. I loved it when I managed a photo lab and could really tweak the filtration,
Posted by: James Weekes | Tuesday, 26 November 2024 at 11:02 AM
Back in the 1970-1980s some color lane would buy up entire emulsion batches of E6 film that their big clients liked and would tweak the processing a little with a half stop push or pull becoming the normal development. Then eventually they would run out of film and do testing for a few days and start over.
Then there was NYColorworks that built a machine for developing 120 Kodachrome, and had Kodak make 120 Kodachrome just for them. That didn’t last too long. I was in California getting a MFA at the time so I mostly missed it. I did a series of 48x48 cibachrome prints for a project right after and shot whatever the printer recommended, I proposed to use Kodachrome, but he insisted on a Fuji film. Something about the red curve and infrared density messed up the way he did stuff. So despite really wanting to shoot some 120 Kodachrome I never did.
Color photography was an industrial process and trying to make art was not really much of a factor. Those big cibacrhomes were done by a company that made signage and the interior walls of fast food franchisees so making 6 foot high tomatoes and hamburgers look appetizing was all that mattered.
Posted by: hugh crawford | Tuesday, 26 November 2024 at 02:33 PM
My film days were my true snap shooter days, totally oblivious to different types of color film, different looks. I understood film speed, and color vs black and white. But for film, I grabbed whatever was cheap and available and ran it through our Olympus Stylus. Often that meant big packs of Kodak Gold or the FujiFilm equivalent at Costco.
Posted by: John Krumm | Tuesday, 26 November 2024 at 03:06 PM
I once broke all the 'Rules'about film stocks for weddings and shot a garden backyard wedding on 120 Velvia. The marriage didn't last, but the bride still has the slides and Cibachromes - just magic unreal color and her hair just glowed:)
Color is for digital, but man, when it worked, golly it was fun.
Posted by: Rob L. | Tuesday, 26 November 2024 at 04:31 PM
In the early 1990s Konica made what they called "Baby Film", which had a pleasant pastel rendition. Never popular, but it had its charms which I sometimes try to emulate in my digital files. On the other end of the spectrum was Agfacolor Ultra, which had an insane amount of saturation, a precursor to all the over-saturated digital images one sees nowadays.
Posted by: Stephen Cowdery | Tuesday, 26 November 2024 at 10:03 PM
Thirty years ago I worked with my team on the visual identity of a multinational. A job that lasted several years and resulted in a solid manual that I am still proud of. It turned out that the corporate colors (a blueish green with egg yellow) were very hard to handle. Depending on the type of used materials they could turn out completely different. In the manual we made a complete chapter about all kinds applications and the color tolerance within the quality was acceptable. Especially photography gave us headaches because the colors could instead of green and yellow easily change into blue and orange. The client was very sensitive about it because those resembled the colors of one of the main competitors. We decided to run a test with all the emulsions that were available at the time, reversal films as well as transparencies. One of the Fujichromes came out as the winner, but in the end we did not prescribe it in the manual because even when using the same film all the time the quality wasn’t constant enough to make it a standard.
Posted by: s.wolters | Wednesday, 27 November 2024 at 03:02 AM
After the "perfection" of DSLR (mirrorless) color, I like the traditional look of color film. Your pics no longer look digital, less of the mass sameness.
[Yeah, the "mass sameness" (good term) is something I recognize too. I first realized it through DPR's "sample" galleries. At first it was interesting to detect shortcomings and see improvements, but eventually every camera's results started looking so much the same that I wondered why they even bothered. Everything's just ADP, another digital picture. Although there's nothing inherently wrong with that. --Mike]
Posted by: Kodachromeguy | Wednesday, 27 November 2024 at 03:12 AM
EK EPN was "the one". We ran hundreds of feet through our
optical printers each day..."neutral" color balance, good skin
tones for studio work. Years later when shooting for the travel
calendar market Fuji Velvia 220 through a Mamiya M7 was the
ticket.
Posted by: Mark | Wednesday, 27 November 2024 at 06:55 AM
Fuji Astia was a good film during the transition away from a chemical darkroom, before digital cameras were good enough (a least the digital cameras I could afford). It scanned well and the handoff to Photoshop was pretty painless.
Posted by: Shaun | Wednesday, 27 November 2024 at 08:14 AM
As a young fashion photographer for film, I loved was Agfa 1000RS the grain was special, then when I went to using colour negative I spent a long time worrying about what film stock to use, an after spending a lot of time experimenting and a three month stint in Greece I found my film, it turned out to be 1990’s version of Fuji Superior 800 as I could use it in most lighting situations and it had enough grain to hide imperfections in models skin. And for Black and White it was Kodak Tri-x processed in D76. Now that I have gone back to film I have settled on Ilford Delta 400 processed in Atomal49 or Atomal XT3. If I want to create colour images I use digital. As I have a great A2 printer and I can get the results I want from that. Since my turn to social documentary photography I am now trying to decide if I want to work in black and white or stay working in colour, that is the next decision I need to make.
Posted by: Michael Wayne Plant | Wednesday, 27 November 2024 at 12:21 PM