Originally posted by jzietman I read in a few places that kodachrome did well in overcast light, so I wasn't worried about shooting it this summer in such conditions. The slides themselves are lovely (and the ones in bright sunlight are, too), but the scans are very blue and the reds are diminished significantly. It's quite a pain to fix them, especially the underexposed ones, but really all of them are trouble. Having only 2GB of RAM doesn't help when photoshopping 130+ MB files, either.
I'm glad I did this experiment, it was a good learning experience, I know my scanning software much better, and there are some great shots that came out of it. For someone who doesn't project, though, who scans all his color film because he can't print it, kodachrome's just not worth the trouble or the price.
It's probably part of why it's been discontinued: the jewel-like qualities of it aren't as much of a muchness without the projection or conventional (Or Cibachrome, maybe) printing, anyway. But there's just nothing quite like it, either.
I became somewhat disillusioned with the brightness of the colors somewhere early in my photographic life: for one, I had the pet peeve that I'd be out shooting Kodachrome and when I got back the slides the ubiquitous discarded Coke cans of the day would just keep cropping up somewhere in frame, redder than life. I guess it was also about the same time I had my first really bad sunlight reaction,
I ended up getting to be all about subtleties that I could get from E-6 and all. Unfortunately, at the same time the manufacturers were in a 'vivid colors' contest.
I think that for color film, there's no substitute for negative size, in some ways, though: I'm kind of a mostly-monochrome gal long since, but the way I like to think is that digital makes a good substitute for color 35mm and 120 is where I'd really want to do serious color film. If I had much of a budget for color film, this is where the old 6x7 was just my favorite ever. Even if the camera itself was mean to me by being big and heavy, the results couldn't be argued with.