We had a few days of freezing weather in UK over the last few weeks. I went on my usual morning walks and really thought that the landscape would look really nice if I had it shot on slides. Unfortunately I only had my EOS5 loaded with APX400 and my mobile phone.
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Is anyone shooting slides nowadays? I am wondering where do you get them developed or if anyone is using medium format for them, any camera recommendations for it etc.. etc..
And of course if you have any pictures please post them...
Gorgeous images. Typically for one born in eastern Canada, I felt the cold seeping into my bones when I looked at them...
Sadly like so many others, slides are now ancient history for me. If memory hasn't yet failed me, in my film fridge at home I have a few rolls of Fujichrome 50 and 100 in other '25 and 120, some Ektachrome 100 in 120, a few strange and long-outdated European manufactured slide films probably from the 19502-1960s, and a dozen colour negative films from Kodak and Fuji. None of which I dare use as it's all long outdated and the colors will be all over the place, even if those old films can resolve any images at all.
More a problem is what to do with the 40+ rolls of 120 Ilford XP2 I've kept frozen for I've forgotten how many years. I won't be using it so it will likely end up on Ebay later this year when I'm back home. No more to be said about this lot as after all we were discussing color slide film.
My recollections are that I last used 35mm slide film about eight years ago. I had almost all of my old E6 done by Vanbar in Melbourne, the results were excellent but I paid more for the processing as I had for the films.
For a few years in the '00s I did all my own E6 and C41 processing at home, with a Jobo Duolab and with mostly Fuji color kits. Then film and processing kit processing went skyward and digital came along and like so many of us I got lazy. It all became easier to just grab the Nikon D90 and blast away, as I did, thousands of digital images the first couple of years I had that kit. After 16 years of post processing, captioning and keywording I now shoot much more sparingly and I batch process images with dates, image number and place name. Only those images I rate as my best do I spend more time on the laptop to update them. Occasionally when I have free time at home and I feel that old urge popping up again, I scan a few rolls of old slides or negatives and go through the entire process with those. My Epson scanner can do up to 12 at a time but it's best for medium format. For '35 I use a Plustek which involves pushing the images through the scanner by hand. If I live to 132 I hope to scan all my film archives, but that's a tad optimistic, I suspect. If I had nine lives like our cats, maybe.
In the 1990s I had my C41 and E6 souped by a pro lab in Surabaya, but last year when I checked those slide folders I discovered they were all color shifting. I suspect the lab was cutting corners with its processing chemistry. Maybe they can be rescued, but all the scanning and post processing I'll have to do, sigh. Ten more years and a tenth cat life...
