Increasing the ASA?

[DREW WILEY]

Alan - what spelled out the demise of Kodachrome was its unique complex development combined with Kodak foolishly consigning that slide development to a third party having lower quality control than they did. People weren't happy. Velvia wasn't on the horizon yet. And to this day, many photographers wish Kodachrome was still around.

In fact, the predominant chrome sheet film in the US was Ektachrome 64, which wasn't as contrasty or saturated as current Ektachrome. Then Fujichrome 50 showed up as the grandfather to both the Provia and Velvia series, with Astia being a gentler rendition.

Even in the really tiny country store where I grew up, one could always count on two types of film being on hand : Kodachrome and Kodak Gold. They were kept on the same shelf as the rifle ammo and shotgun shells. And as a favor to me, the storekeeper even added a bit of pre-E6 Agfachrome with prepaid mailers. He made runs to the city once a week in his pickup, and would bring back snapshots and processed slides, and yes, even inexpensive album prints made from slides rather than color negs. None of those prints were of particularly good quality; but machine generated internegs for sake of casual C prints were quite common, or else R prints directly from slides. If someone wanted exciting color, they pulled out the slide projector instead.

At a commercial level, advertising was just one aspect. Portrait pros needed the softer kind of palette color negative films provided,
along with relatively affordable chromogenic prints. Dye transfer printing, mainly from chromes, was an expensive luxury which most people didn't even know about. Then came the Cibachrome revolution, not cheap either, but simpler to do.

Most stock photo agencies wanted easily "readable" large format sheet film chromes. 35mm slides weren't generally accepted except in certain niche categories : sports, wildlife, and photojournalism like Natl Geo did.

 

[MattKing]

Kodachrome went by the wayside because it was essentially a motion picture film, and the processing infrastructure required the volumes that motion picture film created.
Home video is what killed it - the still film volumes alone couldn't support the labs that made the product economic.
Ektachrome arrived on the scene in the 1940s. Velvia arrived in 1990.

 

[fstop]

That may very well be correct, but makes no sense at all to me. Why would professionals use mainly slide film? I can think of very few applications where the customer would ask for slide film.

In the 70s and into the 80s most people buying images wanted transparencies. I was a stock photographer for a number of years until a fire wiped out my stock and my equipment in the mid 80s. I shot Kodachrome 64 almost exclusively.I was already out of the game before Velvia was introduced.
My comment was to help the OP understand there may be a possibility his meter is biased one way or the other.Its a simple matter to make EV adjustments until you get the desired results. Not get into an argument.
My favorite car show camera was a consumer grade Minolta XG-1( they didn't draw attention either) with the 45mm lens that came with them,compact, simple, fast, produced sharp images and fantastic color as long as the EV was set to under expose approximately -1/2. never had to do this with an F3.

 

[Alan Edward Klein]

Didn't the one-hour labs greatly affect switching to print film from slides? I remember a time when I had trouble deciding if I wanted to shoot 35mm slide film to project or use negative color film and get prints. My slide film would have to be mailed out to a Kodak photo lab in another state. I'd have to wait around a week or so before I got them back to project. I still have a large slide viewer with the overlay that allows me to move the slides around en masse for review before setting up for projection. But I rarely shoot 35mm at all today.

With negative color film like Gold, I could drop off the film in a neighborhood lab for processing and pick it up in one hour. The lab would furnish two sets of 4x6" prints that I could give one set to family and keep the other set for my photo albums. The print film eventually won out for the most part with 35mm except when I went scuba diving. When I started to shoot medium format, I switched eventually to chromes when I began scanning because I found it easier to get the colors right than with negative color film, plus I liked Velvia colors.

 

[BrianShaw]

For what it is worth I feel that instead of it being about cameras' different metering systems it maybe harks back to a variation on a statement that I have seen before on Photrio which is raging now in this thread that some cameras' metering was specifically designed for correct exposure for slide film rather than negative film. If I recall correctly this was alleged to be true for the meter in an F5

pentaxuser

Have you ever seen that described in any sales material or user guides? I’d expect it to either be a marketing boast or in the user manual yet I’ve never noticed such a claim. No offense to anyone believing this, but it sounds to me like a hypothetical that has been repeated a lot in photo forums with no factual foundation clearly stated. I’d love to be “proven” wrong. Recollection and “belief/feel” are sometimes error-prone.

 

[BrianShaw]

Alan… 1-hour C41 processing coexisted with 3-hour E-6 turnaround for a very long time in the 1980-2000 era. This was true at “pro labs” but not always at “camera stores”, but not necessarily at “wedding photography labs” which were 120 negative-based. Either media was quick and easy to get processed so choosing a media tended to depend on usage/need more than ease/speed of processing. The long pole in the tent was your beloved Kodachrome, which took a virtual forever to get processed.

 

[Nicholas Lindan]

Yeah, Kodachrome was inconvenient to get processed.

But anything that is really worth doing is hard and inconvenient. The easy isn't worth bothering with.

A factor in the rise of C-41 was the dramatic increase in print quality, especially with Kodak's Royal Gold and Fotomat's premium processing. However, even in the mid-late 80s it was possible to get s**t processing at any number of drugstores and strip mall processing shops.

 

[BrianShaw]

But anything that is really worth doing is hard and inconvenient. The easy isn't worth bothering with.

Often true but it really depends on each individual’s requirements/desirements for their specific “anything”.

 

[fstop]

I only used Kodak for slide film, local labs for prints on the rare occasion I shot negative film, the quality was wildly variable.

Have you ever seen that described in any sales material or user guides? I’d expect it to either be a marketing boast or in the user manual yet I’ve never noticed such a claim. No offense to anyone believing this, but it sounds to me like a hypothetical that has been repeated a lot in photo forums with no factual foundation clearly stated. I’d love to be “proven” wrong. Recollection and “belief/feel” are sometimes error-prone.

Buy some cameras and test it for yourself. Good excuse to exercise GAS.

 

[BrianShaw]

Buy some cameras and test it for yourself. Good excuse to exercise GAS.

I didn’t make the claim; I believe you did. I have no GAS nor any interest in proving or disproving the claims made by others. If you can’t support your claim other than repeating that you are correct, that’s fine with me. My experience with both film types and both camera types “explains” that concept differently. Peace, out.

 

[DREW WILEY]

You got what you paid for. Many one hour labs delivered abominable results. Fotomat was better. I shot exclusively Kodachrome 25 as a teenager but eventually added Agfa 50 35mm because that what my older brother often used in 4X5 for his stock photo income; both those films required special processing which was tightly controlled. By the 80's I was shooting exclusively 4x5, after a brief phase of 120 transparency work.

No light meter ever asked me what type of film I was using; all I had to set was the film speed. I never owned a DX coded automated exposure camera, and never will. But I remain skeptical of any unproven rumor that meters were biassed one way or the other. Yes, they differed in quality, angle of view, type of photocell, incident versus reflectance, etc. - but never before this particular thread have I ever heard even a hint of some hypothetical other major variable. And going out and testing a bunch of funky old cameras whose meters have probably started drifting long ago, if they even still work, doesn't make much sense either.

 

[fstop]

I didn’t make the claim; I believe you did. I have no GAS nor any interest in proving or disproving the claims made by others. If you can’t support your claim other than repeating that you are correct, that’s fine with me. My experience with both film types and both camera types “explains” that concept differently. Peace, out.

I have the information somewhere.If I find it I'll post it. I saw it either in a service manual or a technical article from Pop Photo years ago.
It really doesn't matter because I only shoot film now for fun,anything for publication is digital.

 

[DREW WILEY]

Well, I wouldn't trust just anything Pop Photo published, if in fact it did say that; it was hardly a technical or pro journal. "Pop"- anything magazines had to be taken with a grain of salt.

 

[BrianShaw]

I have the information somewhere.If I find it I'll post it. I saw it either in a service manual or a technical article from Pop Photo years ago.
It really doesn't matter because I only shoot film now for fun,anything for publication is digital.

I agree that it doesn't matter (especially to you at this point, it seems) yet its an interesting topic. After using 127 box cameras, I started with Minolta SRT-102, which had a interesting metering system - two CDS cells to better manage scene contrast... like a 2-element matrix metering situation. Then to Nikkormat FT-3 and Nikon F-3, Both center-weighted meters, like your XG-1. All of which benefit all types of film when shooting in automatic mode. I can imagine reviews of cameras with these types of meters, and even moreso with the mulitple matrix metering that followed, to off-handedly state that it really helps improve performance with E-6 transparencies. That may be part of a driving requirement by the manufacturer, but the bigger part probably was to enhance exposure accuracy with ALL films to be used. Even Ken Rockwell in his Nikon F5 review just states the technical specifications and the overall improvement in exposure accuracy without specifiying that the camera/meter design was for this type of film or that type of film.

 

[BrianShaw]

As an additional source of information, I googled "is any camera designed for transparency film" and got an AI reply:

AI Overview

Yes, there are a few cameras designed for transparency film, including:

• Ricoh Xobbox: A limited edition, transparent, point-and-shoot camera made in 1993. It has a 35mm lens, fixed focus, and a shutter speed of 1/125 of a second.
  
  
  
• To Be Continued (TBC) Transparent Camera: A reusable film camera with a translucent PETG body that allows you to see the camera's mechanisms.
  
  
  
• Klutz Transparent Green 35mm Point and Shoot Film Camera: A transparent green 35mm point and shoot film camera.

 

[fstop]

Well, I wouldn't trust just anything Pop Photo published, if in fact it did say that; it was hardly a technical or pro journal. "Pop"- anything magazines had to be taken with a grain of salt.

Popular Photography was a well respected magazine in the 70s and 80s, don't know what happened after mid 80s or so.
Been absent from here for a while, refreshign to know nothing has changes.

 

[DREW WILEY]

Brian - It's comforting go know that AI is still dumber than we are. Ask it if it can design a disposable translucent plastic robotic photographer.

 

[fstop]

I agree that it doesn't matter (especially to you at this point, it seems) yet its an interesting topic. After using 127 box cameras, I started with Minolta SRT-102, which had a interesting metering system - two CDS cells to better manage scene contrast... like a 2-element matrix metering situation. Then to Nikkormat FT-3 and Nikon F-3, Both center-weighted meters, like your XG-1. All of which benefit all types of film when shooting in automatic mode. I can imagine reviews of cameras with these types of meters, and even moreso with the mulitple matrix metering that followed, to off-handedly state that it really helps improve performance with E-6 transparencies. That may be part of a driving requirement by the manufacturer, but the bigger part probably was to enhance exposure accuracy with ALL films to be used. Even Ken Rockwell in his Nikon F5 review just states the technical specifications and the overall improvement in exposure accuracy without specifiying that the camera/meter design was for this type of film or that type of film.

In the 70s I had used a number of cameras, F ,F2 for shooting black and white for year book pics.We kept notes on exposure, if you do that a pattern will be apparent something the OP should do
I then owned several 35mm cameras including Minolta XG-1 XK,XD5, XD11 and Nikon FA and F3 in the 70s and 80s.Plus had a 500CM I was working on building a light weight mono rail 4x5 when it all burned up in freak house fire and I didn't pick up a camera for many years.
I don't know what they did after the mid 80s I started again with digital in the late 90s so I don't know anything about what was done after 85 or so and really don't care.. In 2011 I started collecting the cameras I always wanted and to complete product lines and now have over 100 35mm 70s 80s slrs from Minolta,Nikon,Canon,Leica and Olympus even have a Pentax ME somewhere. I replaced the Blad and got a 4x5 to play with while I design my own.

The cameras of the 70s and early 80s are very interesting, they had style.The plastic blobs that followed are of no interest to me.
The 70s was the golden age for 35mm, those cameras worked very well if you learned their quirks.It was common practice to shoot test rolls when you got a new camera to see where it needed to be set.This is what the OP should do, find the ASA or EV setting where it does what you want it to do and don't worry about the actual number.

Now for the next argument, does anyone remember Polaroid Polachrome Instant 35mm film?

 

[BrianShaw]

Polaroid Polachrome Instant 35mm film... I was an early adopter, and also early unadopter. Had great promise but the quality was lacking. I might still have the processor in a box somewhere. I know I still have some of the slides.

 

[Jim Jones]

Kodak processing for Kodachrome may have been slow for most, but during my Navy career it was wonderfully convenient. I even had a rubber stamp made for the 925 Page Mill Road address in Palo Alto CA. Those 10,000+ Kodachrome slides from many decades ago have few problems attributable to Kodak, although many problems from my photographic shortcomings. Ektachrome scenic shots from decades ago may have acquired a sometimes pleasant color shift, while little remains of the images by a few other brands and some Ektachrome processors. The Great Yellow Father who dwelt in Rochester did let us down by discontinuing a few great films, such as Tech Pan. Processed in Solarol produced the best solarized images of its time. Perhaps that effect can now be digitally achieved with better control, but Tech Pan was available when digital photography was rare.

 

[DREW WILEY]

They stopped coating TechPan about 20 years before they ceased to distribute it. It's was remarkable in its keeping quality, but allegedly relied on a unique base they didn't use for any other film. I used it for forensic purposes like painting fraud sleuthing in larger sizes, and for title slides in 35mm. Didn't care much for it in pictorial applications. Some of its applications transferred over to TMax, but not others. Yeah, it would be nice if some of those former films were still around; but Kodak still has the bases pretty well covered, both in black and white and color neg film, with at least a token excellent product in chrome film too. The quality control seems better than ever.