The Vintage Color Look

Exactly as kully says above. I've had good results with an old lens, a Jupiter-8 in this case, and velvia -- pastel shades.

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Roger:

Yes! I think you've got the solution.

After a bit of Googling I know that it's now branded Rollei Scanfilm, and read your piece about it at shutterbug.net

Thank you.

Dear Jon,

Sorry I misremembered the name. It was on the Maco stand last photokina; Maco has licensed the Rollei name for this one. It's an Agfa-Gevaert film (they're still coating, of course).

Cheers,

R.
 
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Try shooting some outdated 120 film in a Holga. I shoot some stuff on the beach this year with a Holga and outdated Reala that I really like.

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Buy outdated kodachrome (or whatever) and get it developed normally, without any compensation. Your normally blue skies will have a nice magenta cast to them.
 
try portra nc with old lenses
see http://www.flickr.com/clarice_e_simon/page2/

and the statement about saving private Ryan couldn't be more wrong,
janusz kaminski, the cinematographer, used the skip bleach bypass to heighten and desaturate the picture, it's way more elaborate than a little photoshop, also please honor the craft of the director of photography, we should, as photographers :)
 
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Buy outdated kodachrome (or whatever) and get it developed normally, without any compensation. Your normally blue skies will have a nice magenta cast to them.

I don't believe you can do that.

Kodachrome is a process quite unlike any other.

What you can do is to use another 'chrome E6 film and process it as if it were a 'color C41 film. I do it all the time myself. This is known as crossprocessing (or xpro) and can give the color shift you describe.

Here's an example of xpro I put on my photoblog this morning.

But I'm now after 'vintage' not 'xpro'.


Edit: I changed the photo in the link. The new one is more typical of how I use xpro.
 
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Jon, Hi, I have been messing around with this. Here is the best film solution I have come up with; old and bad lens, Fuji Superia 100:

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Funny, it doesn't look as vintage as it did two months ago.
 
I use Kodachrome 64 with my old 50's Summicron 50 f2 collapsible lens. Besides using the vintage stuff its fun to see how it turns out. The results look just like your dad or grandpa took them. People always ask how I got that look. Also works great with B&W film.
 
Jon, some have suggested old film / expired film. I look for it and use it. It's not always pretty but I like the effect.
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jan normandale:

That's the right look. Thank you.

I'll look online for old film although they all lie and say it's been frozen and is good as new.

I need stuff that's been left on a shelf for ten years!
 
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Leica IIIc + 50mm Summar + Kodacolor VR 400 (expired)
slightly under exposed by accident :(
 
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jan normandale:

That's the right look. Thank you.

I'll look online for old film although they all lie and say it's been frozen and is good as new.

I need stuff that's been left on a shelf for ten years!

Jon that was Konica 120 400 ISO about 4 - 5 years old. Hope that helps.
 
jan normandale:


Thank you. I suspect a lot of the film they say has been frozen has just been shelved. But they say it's been frozen because they think it's better, whereas I want shelved.

There used to be somebody at eBay.co.uk who sold old film for about 100 rolls for £1, I need to track them down.
 
jan normandale:


Thank you. I suspect a lot of the film they say has been frozen has just been shelved. But they say it's been frozen because they think it's better, whereas I want shelved.

There used to be somebody at eBay.co.uk who sold old film for about 100 rolls for £1, I need to track them down.

Jon, sounds like postage would be more than the price of the film!
 
I'm not sure exactly what your target is here. Are you trying to get the look that those old films gave when they were new or the look of old pictures faded over the years? The various Ektachromes all fade, and usually shift toward the blue. Old Anscochromes and Agfachromes just seem to look horrid. Kodachromes of any vintage seem to have the most stable dyes for long term storage but supposedly fade more quickly from light, such as frequently projecting them. I have some 1940 vintage Kodachromes that my dad shot with his Retina and the color is still very good although the film is contasty and the shadows tended to go black. Kodachrome II had great long term dye stability and fantastic color. My K-II slides from the early 1970's look as new.

The early color films didn't do a very good job of matching up the color curves of the three different layers, but nobody much cared if the colors weren't perfect. Believable flesh tones, grass that looked green, sky and water that looked blue, and people were thrilled just to have the color.

As for optics, a single element box camera lens can be quite contrasty. It's the light bouncing around between the elements of an uncoated lens that causes the veiling flare. Old uncoated lenses develop a "bloom" on the surfaces from exposure to air which cuts down on those reflections. The original reason for coating was to try and duplicate that bloom on a new lens. The chance of finding a 60 or 70 year old lens today that does not have any of that bloom would be close to zero.

You can play around with Photoshop and get results that look like an old faded photograph but trying to duplicate the way that photograph looked when it was new would require a reasonably new uncoated lens together with the memory of what those old films looked like before they faded. On the other hand my friend Todd Frederick has P-shopped some of my Ektachromes from the early 1960's, gotten rid of the blue cast, boosted the contrast, and come up with some very believable colors out of extremely faded slides, but that doesn't mean that they look like they did forty-odd years ago, just that they look decent. I'm sure that the process can be reversed.
 
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