Nineteen Useful Things to Know About Slide Film

One of Pete Ashton’s posts got me wanting to write furiously in his comments thread, so a) I must be feeling better and b) it’s more polite to use up my own bandwidth for the purpose, so here we go. As ever, please question, disagree, add, whatever.

Nineteen useful things to know about using slide film:
1. The ‘normal’ film that goes into a 35mm compact or single lens reflex (SLR) camera is negative film, 35mm wide. Negative means that when it’s developed, the image (and the colour) is reversed. Slide film is positive: image and colour is not reversed.

2. It’s called ’slide’ film because it can be used to make ’slides’, which can be projected using any bright light source. Negative film is often known as print film, because it is more often used to make darkroom prints. You can make traditional prints out of slide film, but it’s not easy. Slide is primarily for showing through a light source. It’s also often called transparency film.

3. Slide (aka positive or transparency) film carries the colours on each frame as shot by the photographer, and these’re easy to see just by holding the frame up to the light. With negative film, it has to go through some kind of process to show itself, and each process (printing, scanning etc), will produce a different result. With slide film, what you originally saw through the camera lens, is what you get.

4. Fujifilm’s Velvia, Provia and the now extinct Agfa Precisa are popular and well loved makes of slide film. If you love photography, at some point it is inevitable that you’ll want to use slide film. “Mmmm, Velvia” is commonly heard in camera clubs and amongst afficianados the world over. At point of sale, the two types of films look identical, and load identically to your camera.

5. Slide film is notorious for being more sensitive to light than print film, which is altogether more relaxed about the whole exposure thing. You’ll be making full use of your camera’s integral light meter for accurate exposure, and/or using a nice quality compact camera for good results.

6. Get (or make) an 18% grey card. Adjust your camera’s shutter speed or lens aperture to balance the light meter exactly when pointed at the grey. If you haven’t got a grey card, a tarmac pavement, a patch of grass, or a well tanned forearm will do the same job.

7. Processing slide film tends nowadays to mean mail order. You will be looking for someone who processes by the E6 method. (Negative film is processed by the C41 method). I get mine processed using the vouchers from the DLab7 branch of 7dayshop, which is also a great source for really cheap film.

8. Mount or not to mount? A slide mount is a little plastic (or cardboard) frame around each frame, which fits into a carrier to project light through your slides. If you are ever going to project your slides, and trust me, you are definitely going to want to, get it mounted. It’s a horribly fiddly thing to do yourself, and finding mounts isn’t all that easy these days. Most film scanners come with frames for scanning mounted slides: my cheapo Epson certainly does.

9. Projectors are free. No, really they are free. Everybody’s dad, grandad or uncle has got a slide projector gathering dust in an attic somewhere, and most people don’t know what to do with them any more. Ask on whatever flavour of Freecycle exists in your local neighbourhood, or ask around your extended family. If you get stuck, I’ve got three of them here. Slide carriers are readily available, if they don’t come in the same dusty box, and if (unlikely) the bulb has gone, you can get another at any proper electrical shop. These things have very little in them to go wrong. Get one.

10. Hang a large white sheet or cheapie shower curtain on your largest bare wall, or across your curtain rail, push back the couch, stack your newly acquired projector on a few encyclopedias, close the curtains, and enjoy. The first time you throw light though a set of your carefully composed photographic transparencies is an absolute revelation, and will have you completely hooked. There is seriously no going back.

11. Although you can scan and print your slides yourself, or have your slides scanned and printed at a local developing shop, traditional Cibachrome printing is still available, and although expensive, is definitely worth doing for that special photograph you’re really proud of. The quality is absolutely stunning. Nothing we see these days outside of fine art photography galleries comes even close.

12. Cross processing (often abbreviated xpro) has become fashionable in recent years amongst mainly the Lomo crowd, and is when negative film is processed as E6, or more commonly when slide film is processed by your local minilab in as ordinary C41 colour film. It produces unpredictable effects, mainly weird and wonderful colours and enhanced grain. I love cross processing, but to fully embrace its zen, one has to enjoy the unpredictable, so it probably isn’t for everyone.

13. All the photographs with these weird enhanced greens, pinks and blues are produced by slide film which has been cross processed. There are theories that Provia produces the pink and blue hues, whist Velvia and some Kodachromes produce the greens, but this is mainly anecdotal evidence so far, and depends on the lab you use and what time of day the chemicals were mixed etc.

14. You can colour-correct the livid greens and wilder effects in your scanner software. Beware: many developing labs will deliberately produce even more wildly unnatural effects in your cross-processed slide film, because they think you want that effect. You can always ask to have particular settings for your prints, or watch while the film is fed through the machine. Better still, scan your own.

15. Many labs, particularly of the supermarket cheapo type, will refuse to process E6 film at all, since the staff are specifically told that C41 processing is not to be done on E6 film, and they are right about that. If you’ve got your exactingly exposed Velvia landscapes mixed in with your holiday snaps by mistake, you’d appreciate the lab telling you about it, wouldn’t you?

16. Look for a lab that will happily process E6 films by the C41 method. There are an increasing number who will, and who set up their systems to do this by putting the films through their machines at the end of the day, when any changes to the chemical balance of the developing soup, won’t affect normal C41 films that might have been put in the tanks later.

17. You don’t need a Lomo camera to make cross-processed photographs. Any compact or film SLR will do. The grungier photos might have been created by cameras with plastic lenses or by using a through-the-viewfinder contraption or even have been shot through the bottom of a plastic bottle.

18. You can get slide film in 120 too, for your medium format camera. Cross processed Kodak Ekachrome is allegedly what Dolores Marat uses to get these extraordinary results: definitely worth emulating.

19. Photography in general isn’t cheap, but slide photography is fabulous quality is and achievable very easily with a cheap film camera from as little as 50p, slide film from £1 a roll, and developing at around £4-5 including prints from your local lab. There can be few greater pleasures.

Oh joy!

A few resources:
Slide film on Wikipedia
Slide film to buy from Seven Day Shop
Developing from DLab 7
Geeky cross processing pdf from Sliverprint: navigate to their film page and scroll down.
Cross processing developing in Newcastle from Spectrum Imaging

Please go ahead and add your own in the comments.

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