Slide Film Advice. Switch to B&W?

[afrank]

I was considering putting my E6 slide 120 films up for trade in exchange for B&W rolls, but a friend of mine was trying to convince me not to, assuring me that later in the years, those precious velvias/provias and Ektachrome's will be impossible to find...
I wanted to concentrate on the B&W process but the argument of later wanting to shoot them and not being able to, considering the current state of the market, made me reconsider.
I suppose the most reliable player at the moment is ILFORD and I don't see them producing color films anytime soon...

Should I hold on to them because of fear or just drop them as I am not using them atm anyway?

 

[DREW WILEY]

Go where your heart takes you; but over the long haul, E6 film won't be of any value if you don't have
any way to process it. There's no immediate risk of the film itself disappearing, just certain flavors.
And it will keep frozen only so long until the color balance degrades.

 

[afrank]

That is indeed another good point. chemistry wise, I've had bad experiences with E6, from the same roll batch, a few get hideous casts depending on the chemistry batch used, whole other turn fine with the "expensive" versions. Labs for E6 are also taking decades here in the Germany to process them.

 

[BrianShaw]

... so how many rolls of film are we talking about here? This kind of "hand-wringing" isn't worth the effort unless one is talking about lots of money involved. No matter, I've done one of the options you are thinking about - discontinuing the use of E-6 in favor of processes that are more readily available.

 

[Sirius Glass]

[h=1]Garden Party Lyrics[/h] Artist: Ricky Nelson



I went to a garden party to reminisce with my old friends
A chance to share old memories and play our songs again
When I got to the garden party, they all knew my name
No one recognized me, I didn't look the same

CHORUS
But it's all right now, I learned my lesson well.
You see, ya can't please everyone, so ya got to please yourself

 

[afrank]

As a student, every roll is lots of money to me! But yea I should just maybe trade them out.

 

[ME Super]

The slide curmudgeon says "Shoot the slide film now. There will be plenty of time to shoot B&W later."

Listen to the slide curmudgeon.

 

[Poisson Du Jour]

Slide film, by dint of its very narrow latitude, requires a different skillset to that you are accustomed to using in black and white, which has a quite expansive latitude and easily forgives errors. If you clumsily expose the E6 stock, you will learn nothing from it. If you take the care to expose it well, you can scan and print from it (a bit different from darkroom stuff). Like you should be doing, I please myself, not using any B&W at all nowadays, and I get beautiful images from spot-metered E6.

 

[ME Super]

I'm mostly a slide shooter, though I'm starting to appreciate B&W and put the occasional roll of B&W through the camera. Slides are for projection in my opinion, but they're kind of like sports cars - they look great, but if you don't know how to drive them, you may very well end up in the ditch.

Modern meters on cameras do very well determining exposure for slide film. Heck, a center-weighted or averaging meter can do well with it.