How to Shoot Slides

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If you haven’t taken the time recently to dust off your slide projector and look at a tray of your favorite photos, you should. If you’re used to digital photography, you’ll be astounded at the image quality of your slides. Remember, 35 mm still photography began as a way to test 35 mm movie film. Each slide is double the size of a 35 mm movie frame. Using a professional 35 mm cameras and fine grain 35 mm film, you are getting the functional equivalent more than 25 Megapixels. To archive those precious images from your once-in-a-lifetime trip nothing beats slides.

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Instructions

Difficulty: Moderate

Things You’ll Need:

35 mm camera
Slide film
Carry a tripod with a cable release. There is a trade off between tripod stability and weight, but many camera bags have handy straps on the bottom to secure a tripod.

Step1

Choose either daylight or tungsten, the right film for the shooting conditions. Film is either daylight balanced to be used under 5600 degree Kelvin lighting like electronic flash or HMI lights, or tungsten balanced like Fujichrome T 64 to be used under 3200 degree Kelvin studio lighting. Daylight film is more readily available. If you have 5600 K film in the camera and plan to shoot under indoor lighting, you need to apply a warm filter to your lens like a Wratten 80A. Even then, most home lighting will still look a bit warm.

Step2

Use finer grain, to achieve better detail. There is a trade off between film speed and image quality. You want to shoot with the slowest film speed possible. Outside in daylight good choices are Fujichrome Velvia at 50 ISO or Kodachrome 64, commonly used for travel, medical and fine art reproduction. Both Kodak and Fujifilm also make 400 ISO slide film. Some films will allow you to push them further. Check with your photo lab for details. Kodachrome ISO 200, for example can be pushed to ISO 800. When doing serious still photography, I usually work with a couple of different camera bodies, so I can simply change lenses to work with my choice of film.

You can’t just expose longer with slower film. During very long exposures, film suffers reciprocity failure where the normal linear relationship between shutter speed and aperture breaks down. When you buy slide film, actually read the accompanying material to see when this problem starts to occur. You'll be given compensation factors to apply.

Step3

Expose for the highlights. Negative film has greater latitude than transparency film. You don’t have to nail the exposure exactly because making prints is a two step process. Negatives work the opposite of transparency film, because you lose details in the shadow portion of the image unless you give your photos enough light. Conversely with slides, too much light produces a clear area in your image.

Step4

Bracket. When in doubt make your best estimate at the right reading for a slide, then shoot another image at both half and double the exposure. When I backpacked through the Grand Canyon I was visiting remote areas I’ll never see again. I have worthwhile images of that trip thanks to bracketing.

Tips & Warnings

What you see is what you get. Slides are easier to store and scan than negatives.
Shooting slides are great way to learn photography. The exposure has to be more accurate than with negatives and the framing has to be precise.
Beware of X rays. If you shoot at high ISO’s some airport X ray machines will actually fog your film. Most airports will allow a hand search of film if you request it.