Shooting Film – Kodachrome 64

For the longest time that I can remember when I shot 35mm film it was either Kodachrome 64 or Kodachrome 200. A couple of paying jobs, some stuff for stock photography, a lot of travel, and all of my personal color photos where on just two types of Kodachrome. It was either that or black and white.

By todays standards it is a farily low saturation film, heck by the late 80′s it was a low saturated film. I knew it, never ever had a color issues with it, and the shots I took 30 years ago look exactly the same as they ever have. The cool thing about Kodachrome is even though it was low saturation (not really just by today’s idiotically cartoonish color standards) it had a way of making certain shades of red really pop compared to neutrals or other colors in the scene. I never shot Kodachrome in any format other than 35mm and would say that out of all the 35mm that I did shoot about 30% was color and 70% was black and white.

I do admit that I did test and then move to Kodak E100S and E100SW when it became available and shot it both in 35mm as well as medium format. I never shot color in large format. So here it is Kodakchrome 64 in all it’s glory, no sharpening, no color or contrast adjustments, just a plain old 4000 DPI scan at 4000 DPI. Not bad for a 1970′s and 80′s film whose basic technology is 50 years old. This slide is about 20 years old.

Nikon F2AS 85mm F1.4 shot wide open at 1/125. Check out the lack of depth of field between the paint brush and the eye.

Here is one that gives you a better feeling for the grain structure of the film.

RB

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