Canadian Railroads > The Ocean on Kodachrome 200

My experiments with "high speed" slide film were always less than satisfying.  Looking back on it, that may be because I used it when the light wasn't very good, and that in itself handicapped the photo badly.  I had tried Agfa 200, Sensia 400 and Ektachrome 200 early on, and asked one day at my local photo store (remember them?) about K200.  The clerk said they didn't stock it, but he knew where there was an expired roll I could have for free.  Since Kodachrome back then included processing, how could I go wrong?

So on a trip to New Brunswick a few weeks later in April of 1997, I decided to try it out, since I certainly didn't have full sunshine.

I walked into Pacific Jct., where the Intercolonial and National Transcontinental Railways meet just west of Moncton, NB for the arrival there of the Ocean, and fired off a few shots as the train came off the ICR.  Since I was so far back in the woods, I didn't even try for Moncton, but jumped ahead to Aulac, for a shot along the Tantramar Marsh with the Sackville, NB shortwave towers in the background.

There were a few more mediocre shots along the way, but this one at Brookfield, NS shows the former station there, shortly before it was moved away from the track and repurposed as the village's tourist bureau.

A few days later, I burned off the rest of the roll with some roster shots in good light at the Fairview roundhouse, and those don't look nearly as washed out, just perhaps a little grainier, so maybe my "high speed" tests weren't all that fair.

GTD

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Yes, I used some 200 where I didn't have to and wish...  I also used Sensia 200,  would have been better with Provia 100F a great film, today I could work with scans better.\

Bob

As a comparison, here's a roster shot from the end of the roll under good lighting conditions.  It's a bit grainy, but there's plenty of contrast and saturation.  This was taken about 10 days later.

GTD



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/14/20 17:37 by cn6218.

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Nice shot at Pacific Junction, which was actually pretty tight for angles for all sorts of reasons.
Fred

Maybe it just didn't handle yellow well. I had problems with Kodachrome looking really dead, so I finally switched to Provia 200, which worked out better for me. Although it was not quite as sharp as K64.

Those images look really good for Kodachrome 200, much better than mine.  I made a bad decision to use a lot of Kodachrome 200 when I acquired a 70-200 f2.5 zoom, and I thought the higher shutter speed enabled by the higher ASA come in handy for handheld shots.  And perhaps it was ok when I was projecting slides onto a lenticular screen.  But once I started scanning those slides the grain and poor color really diminished their appeal.  Looking at your images I wonder if you were getting better Kodachrome processing.  In the latter days of Kodachrome our Kodak lab had a lot of quality control problems.  Your images look pretty good, much better than mine.  My best scans are the older Kodachrome and then Kodachrome II.  Kodachrome 64 was ok but not as good as its predecessors.  By the time I started scanning slides I was ready for something else.  Provia 100 was a good relacement, and right before I went digital I shot some Provia 400 and was surprised at how good it looked scanned.

JBWX