Slides vs Negatives
Slides vs Negatives
I personally love slides. When you project them to huge sizes, there is nothing more satisfying. I've had people thank me when I show 35mm slides, as they are sick of looking at blue screened powerpoint digital projections. But, back to your original question.
If your slides are "thin" and washed out, they are overexposed. Slides are intolerant of exposure error. 1/3 of an f/stop will make a visible difference to a slide. Your dynamic range is effectively 2 stops on either side of the correct exposure. In zone speak (since you shoot B&W), you have zones 3 to zone 7 as your dynamic range. The traditional teaching is to meter for the highlight and let the shadows fall where they may.
I use an incident light meter for slides. If I can't use the incident light meter, I use a spot meter on the highlight that I want to preserve detail in. Then, I open up 2 stops to set the highlight at zone 7 (your meter puts everything you meter from at zone 5). In this way you place the highlight at zone 7.
So now, what do you do about the shadows? You need fill lighting.
Either bring an electronic flash unit with you, or my preferred route is flash bulbs 😀. With a #6 focal plane flash bulb, you can shoot at 1/1000 or 1/2000, so there's no reason to complain about the 1/50 flash X synch speed on your Leica. In fact, the Leica instruction manuals say that you can use up to 1/500 shutter speed with an M class bulb such as a Press 25.
A bulkier option is to bring a big folding reflector along, and have someone assist you in holding it in position. This is to throw light into the shadows, so they get out of the black murk and into zone 3 or higher.
Scanning a slide is much easier in a couple of ways.
First, you always have the slide as a reference.
Second, you can get calibration slides for various emulsions. Kodak used to make ones for Kodachrome and Ektachrome. There are also ones for Fuji (all their emulsions are basically the same, so you only need one Fujichrome reference slide), and Agfa. You then generate a color correction profile for each film type. Vuescan can do this for you, as can that super expensive German program that I've temporarily forgotten the name of. Anyway, you scan your slides in RAW format, then have Vuescan do a batch run to apply the correction profile.
BAM - your scans are now identical to your slides. You can then manipulate to your heart's content with your usual image processing system.
Negatives have far higher dynamic range when shooting (something akin to zone 0 to zone 11 or so). You are probably used to metering for the shadows, and letting the high dynamic range of the film maintain the highlights. Unfortunately, there is no objective standard for color with a negative emulsion, so it is whatever you want it to be.
