What is the difference between transparency film and negative film

I still have it, a tiny Sekonic with a 5 degree spot meter accessory. I think that it is because the Braun puts out the full 6 volts that the 5D3 is not equipped to accept. It uses low voltage trigger. I could be wrong. The Braun has its own sensor and was a very versatile flash.

Here is one of my go-to sources for flash trigger voltage info. Someone in the above thread disparages it but I've found it to be reliable:. It's a start. Maybe there is a difference between the PC port and hot shoe like some mentions in the thread. With a little effort you should be able to find a reputable source if the above links don't float your cork didn't read everything in the first thread.

You can even test your flash trigger voltage with an inexpensive voltage meter. The characteristics of color slide film that are celebrated are a consequence of its high contrast and vivd saturation. The contrast yields its narrow latitude.

As for pros using it, that was because the processes to reproduce color were based on slide film and the fact that the color separator could judge the color match without the presence of the photographer. The color rendering of slide film could be remarkably variable. Kodachrome, in theory was the most reliable in color as in the early days only Kodak processed the film.

In the '80s they opened up processing to independent labs. Though Kodak demanded strict adherence to their QC regimen, the fact was more variability was introduced. E-6 processes have wildly varying results depending on the chemicals used Kodak vs, non-Kodak , the preparation of solutions, Ph, time, temperature, oxidation, agitation etc.

Add to that the storage conditions of unexposed film age, temperature, atmospheric pollutants and the after exposure handling all had an effect on final results. Professional emulsions were tailored to lower saturations and more neutral renditions to ensure suitability for the reproduction of colored materials such as fabrics and pigments. Amateur emulsions were more saturated to appeal to those shooting landscapes and non-critical subjects. When it came to printing a variety of technologies were created over the history of the medium.

The most popular were making an intermediate negative or interneg and printing on reversal paper. The internegative properly made-not trivial rendered better tonality and color and was printed on regular color paper AKA Type C however the intermediate step could reduce sharpness unless one was making an enlarge intermediate such as a 4x5 negative from a 35mm original.

Reversal processes were popular as it was a simpler affair eliminating the interneg. The drawbacks being more expensive paper and a slightly more complex processing regime for TypeR. Cibachrome was popular for its vivid colors and its permanence, the latter a real problem for Type R. Cibachrome was very contrasty and unless the slide was matched well to the medium often resulted in excessively contrasty results.

Elaborate masking techniques were used by custom labs and skilled enthusiasts to reduce contrast and moderate color shifts adding to the complexity of the process. Long comment I know, but the slide film world was not all perfect color and sharp images.

It was a technology that struggled with the constraints of the chemistry. Results could be splendid but achieving those results was far more than just absolute necessity of a correct initial exposure. Type R prints were not as sharp, potentially as Ciba or an excellent interneg as diffusion of the light through the thick Type R emulsion softened detail. Yes, both exposure and color balance were critical when shooting slides no matter what they were used for. I nearly always shot color slide film when shooting color, even when I was doing it for prints.

I found that my Cibachrome print colors were better than I got from negative-based color printing. However, I still needed a filter pack ok, dichro head settings in the darkroom for Cibachrome. In fact, I vaguely recall even having a per-batch color bias for the Cibachrome material itself.

Scanning old slides has been a bit of a surprise in that I've found there are often at least a couple of recoverable stops in very dark regions of a slide using HDR scanning -- they're just not tonally anywhere near where they should be, and wouldn't even be visible in normal projection.

Even my Nikon doesn't see them. I now do HDR scans using a Sony A7RII and do heavy tone mapping to bring the recovered image content back into a more correct tonal range; it really helps unblock shadows. Scanning color slides is briefly mentioned, but processing color transparency film years ago was frequently haphazard, and resulted in film with multiple dust bunnies when the chemical soups were simply topped up and re-used professional grade processing in those days was better and particularly now is much improved.

Scanning old slides therefore requires the use of digital technology to remove dust digital ICE etc but this results in loss of definition: manual removal of dust particles in Photoshop retains definition but can require an hour for a single Kodachrome.

I always found slide film more rewarding than negative, not more difficult. The results that came back from the lab were exactly what you shot.

We did do that, making the shadows very dark to print easily and now scan. It did mean that you would not burn out the highlights.

I didn't like the Fuji's for this reason; strange blue's and green's. When Velvia was introduced I did a lot of test shots and it didn't start to look decent until ISO 25 using calibrated meters. The shadow blocking was horrendous.

On the other hand, I shot a lot of Fuji color neg film when the Associated Press and major newspapers began printing in color. I really liked Reala for photographing people. I found that shooting with slide film had a lasting effect on my photography. I still use an exposure meter a lot of the time with digital to avoid "chimping", as well as making sure the image is worth it. I used to ask myself, is the shot worth 50 cents?

Simplicity, I guess we used to be very good at estimate exoposure back then. I started with an Olympus OM-1, all info was that analog meter that ranged from plus to minus. Fondly recalling when the the match needle metering from my SP was good enough, even for slide film. I got a few pretty nice slide film shots back in college. I attended a location lighting workshop at Brooks Institute in Santa Barbara around 30 years ago.

After calibrating everyone's flash meters more than a few needed correction. I think that getting exposure right in the camera is important. Particularly if you want to obtain the maximum dynamic range with a RAW file. It's another thing altogether to waste time in post trying to fix exposure errors. Great little spot meter with a match needle exposure system.

Very rare to have exposure issues. I shot countless rolls of KC too. It was an amazing film. I had enough to sustain my interest. I also shot a lot of K64 when I was a hobbyist in the late 70s-early 80s.

But when I started doing freelance assignments for magazines I had to adopt E6 to speed-up the turnaround time. When USA Today sparked the move to color in newspapers, I added bricks of color negative film to my freezer. But I still preferred K64 and used it until Kodak discontinued production. My Kodachrome slides from 50 years ago are still vibrant with no fading at all, and with exceptional high resolution.

Agfachrome 50 was great for its reds and clear blues and had good resolution. Ektachrome 64 and faded somewhat and were not as sharp as Kodachrome. Some of the best work I ever did. Digital makes it easy and free to take lots of pictures and frees you from the discipline of carefully composing and thinking.

But it makes it hard to make photos worth keeping. I am trying now to get back in the mode of careful work to make photos that others might want to see 50 years from now - or even next year. With cell phone cameras today, these are shared immediately but no one looks at them a year later. Yes, Kodachrome from the same period as its E-6 rivals was and is considerably more long lived. That's because, as I understand it, Kodachrome was actually a black and white emulsion, to which very stable dyes were applied during a very long and complex process.

E-6 film has less stable colorants embedded in the emulsion that are activated by the chemical reactions caused by the E-6 chemical processing. The E-6 film dyes faded much more easily but the E-6 process was simpler, faster and cheaper, so it eventually survived while Kodachrome didn't.

Sad, but it's the way of the world. In my later years of shooting transparency film for publication for clients, I installed an E-6 processing "line" in my studio to take as much control of the image outcome as I could. It was an interesting experience and helped my work come out better and faster. My experience is that Kodachromes keep well in the dark, but they can fade very badly if you leave them where daylight can get at them.

Yes, of course, all films, and prints as well, will fade when constantly exposed to light. Given equal exposure, Kodachrome will fade more slowly, but it will fade and change color, sooner or later. All film and prints that you want to preserve, should be kept in the dark, in a cool dry space and not in direct contact with any acidic or out-gassing materials example, an acid free carboard box , whenever possible. Of course, prints for display can't, by definition, be kept in the dark, but they should at least be kept behind glass or UV blocking stable and non out-gassing clear plastic, with an airspace between the glass or plastic surface and the surface of the print, and in places where only indirect sunlight hits them.

When I got into photography as a hobby my budget was very limited, so I treated every 35mm frame like it was a 4x5. The only roll of film I ever lost was a 36 exposure K64 that went to Kodak for processing circa It had 2 months of what I knew were great shots from the eastern Sierra. After that every roll had a frame of ID information and an exterior address label.

I also started spreading shoots across multiple rolls as insurance. Even when I went pro in the late 80s and had motor drives on my 35mm cameras, I tended to shoot less than my colleagues but of course I had to speed-up enough to satisfy the picture editors. I didn't change my shooting style when I made the move from film to digital. I'm amazed at how many images people capture these days when we typically delivered the goods shooting a fraction of their frames.

National Geographic stories being a notable exception. Those were the days. Kinda miss them, even tho it was very expensive and that wait to get the rolls devopled and sent back.

I rarely had any unused film by the end of the trip. It was such a treat to watch the first slide show! I don't understand. You can get an image on a piece of plastic?

How does the camera print anything on plastic? Or is that done in a "lab". I don't get it. You received your processed slides in a box. Colour was what you expected to see. You viewed them with a light table, a slide viewer, or a projector. And then probably never looked at them again! Two of the, many, advantages of digital are accessibility and ease of viewing.

The film itself is changed by the chemical development process so that the colours you photographed turns transparent hence the name "transparencies" that was also used for slide film and can be projected on a large screen by shining light through it with a projector.

The mounted slides is the cut up film itself. You can of course also project the slide onto light sensitive paper, thus creating a coloured photograph.

Most movies you see in the theater are in reality just a whole lot of slides pushed fast through a projector. I am assure you I looked at the slides often. They were the keystone of my business. First sales were important. Residual sales were just as important.

Speaking of residual sales, my best experiences with that was when I was shooting mostly for Time-Life, Inc. Since I was based in Michigan, they called me to shoot mostly in the Midwest, but even occasionally elsewhere, even in NYC one time. Regardless, at the time, Time-Life had their own stock photo department, and if you shot for them, your work automatically went into their sales bin.

What was great was, they never let you know about a sale until you received the check in the mail. To anyone else here who ever worked for them then, remember those long thin tan film envelopes with templates for caption information? Plus my major newspaper clients U. I licensed many images for college textbook publishers when I was shooting professional theatre. Every time they published a new edition often annually it required a new license and another check. Here's a shout-out to fotoQuote Thanks Cradoc for helping me dramatically increase my licensing income.

My first sale after purchasing the software was for around 5 times more than I had previously accepted for the same usage terms.

I retired comfortably at 60 I'll be 67 in May. It's a crying shame that younger photographers don't have the range of decent-paying income options we had in the golden years of editorial photography. And after testing it on various cameras I never use it. Center-weighted and spot are faster and more accurate in my experience. Matrix Metering has its own idiosyncrasies, so if you are going to use it you need to learn how to compensate for those variables.

And MM often works slightly differently depending on the camera, one of the things Thom Hogan covers in his excellent Nikon camera guides. In the article I missed the mentioning of the color randomness of slide films. As an amateur, I shot about slide films from to about The reason I suddenly stopped with slides was only one: the color cast was always quite different.

Maybe I should have bought professional films out of the fridge but that's knowledge I have now. I scanned several thousands of my slides during the last few years and found some slides survived very well and others didn't, for no obvious reason. I really like digital, because compared to slides it's me who's in control. I shot many hundreds of rolls of Kodak and Fuji slide films of all types, and sold thousands of rolls to customers, and never saw anything I'd call random color casts.

Theoretically, the refrigerated versions of film were more consistent batch to batch, but I never saw that in real results. As the article says, film is balanced for a particular color temperature, so you can see warm or cool color casts, depending on light conditions. Maybe that's what you're referring to? But in similar light, the slide films I shot all looked pretty consistent from roll to roll--i.

Poor processing can also cause color casts in film. That some of your film has deteriorated over time might be an indication of processing issues. My slides -- processed in pro labs and stored in archival sheets -- have not deteriorated at all since the s Kodachrome, Ektachrome, and Fujichrome. My KC lasted. And I stopped using Agfa. Difference was processing. Here a lot of Agfa CT I really liked this film, when the colors were right. In hindsight Kodachrome 64 always was worth the double price.

Ektachrome is fading out after all those years. The worst were the re-spooled movie stocks sold by the likes of Seattle Filmworks. You would buy a roll and send it back to them for processing there was an anti-halination layer that had to be removed. Some of my slides from the mids on this stock are now basically just shades of red. My Kodachromes and Agfachromes from the same time are still good.

I even have some 4x5 Kodachromes of my father from not taken by me that are fine. More than a few pros I knew would buy large quantities of slide film of the same batch that they tested for color and exposure. They tended to work in fashion or product industries.

Most film stored in a freezer would keep for years except for high-speed film that could go bad within months due to background radiation. The more expensive professional emulsions were more consistent because of tighter production controls and they were always refrigerated.

When I started using E6 film for assignments I FedExed stuff overnight to a pro lab in a city miles from my rural home base. It was worth every penny. And anyway the clients were footing the bill. That lab didn't make a single mistake during the 20 years I used them.

The slides came back clean as a whistle. According to my film files, E-6 fades less than C and suffer less colored spots. But if the final bath is omited, E-6 will acquire a yellow tinge after 25 years. From my experience, slide film development is not "slightly" more expensive than C It's about twice as much. It really depends I guess. I recently shot a few Provia rolls in format and was pleasantly surprised when my local photo store told me it would only cost around 7 EUR or so per roll to develop.

I feared the worst how many rolls do the lab still develop, how fresh are the processing baths? Think pre-digital. Just the way it was. The Fuji GX was an incredible camera. What a difference viewing slides on a light table vs.

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The 'Deakinizer' lens was made and popularized by cinematographer Roger Deakins when he used a modified Arri Macro lens to capture dreamy, tilt-shift like shots for the movie Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. From these images I've created 5x10 foot murals as well as billboards. OK, so what I'm saying is the negative film is superior to transparency right? No, not at all. It all depends on the subject and the lighting. Advantages of transparency are that despite improvements to the fine detail rendering capabilities of negative films that several transparency films still have the edge, producing virtually no grain.

The transparency films I use in the studio and under completely controlled lighting conditions produce rich, saturated, balanced images of products, food and portraits. But for both industrial and architectural applications where the lighting cannot be completely controlled and in the case of exterior architectural shoots where the lighting may be constantly changing negative films offer clear advantages.

Lastly a significant feature of transparency film is that the results are what was captured. That is to say that the film can be used as a guide or a standard when the image is reproduced.

With negative film every reproduction including the scan, prints and printing is ultimately an interpretation as no definitive "master" is produced. Using transparency can serves as a good quality control measure, but again this assumes that the record captured by the film is ideal and preferred. Uncorrected light sources will still appear as off color and shadow detail may still be blocked up or worse yet highlights may contain no information at all.

As an experienced professional one of my responsibilities to my clients is to advise them when certain options may be to their advantage, even if those options appear to contradict convention.

As I mentioned at the beginning, this whole discussion will soon be mute as we move into an all digital world read more about this here but for now I will try to offer my clients the best options reflecting the best value for their projects. That punchy look that Velvia offers just works for landscapes, and offers a very natural and realistic result. But you can see in other shots that you have to be very careful with your exposure, or might blow out important details like snow and clouds.

The light in the shade is generally much cooler than strobes or sunlight. So, that warmth and saturation of Velvia can really help to produce a fantastic skintone. John Aldred is based in Scotland and photographs people in the wild and animals in the studio. You can find out more about John on his website and follow his adventures on YouTube. Your email address will not be published. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

Dunja Djudjic is a writer and photographer from Novi Sad, Serbia. You can see her work on Flickr , Behance and her Facebook page. Alex is a commercial photographer based in Valencia, Spain.

Learn about Slide Film for Portraits. See slide film and color negative comparisons below. The main reasons for that: Reversal film not only offers finer grain but also significantly higher resolution and better sharpness. Slide projection is also much much cheaper than digital projection. The costs of slide projection are negligible Better versatility and flexibility with reversal film: many more ways to use and enjoy it. You already have a finished picture with the developed film, so you only need to hold it against the light to enjoy them.

For smaller magnification, you can use a slide viewer or a slide loupe on a light table outstanding quality with an excellent slide loupe, much better than any scanned image on a computer monitor. You can project it for unsurpassed image quality at almost no cost. You can scan it and make excellent prints on silver-halide photo paper. You can make optical prints on BW direct positive paper.

In comparison color, negative film is designed for prints only, so much fewer choices.