STEVE PEARCE PHOTOGRAPHY

When I first started taking photographs as a hobby, I bought a basic Canon SLR and zoom and shot print film. Quite a few of my friends are also photographers and after the first time I was invited to see a friends slide show, print film was out of the window.  The colours and contrast of slides viewed 6 feet wide on a screen takes some beating!

Initially, after buying some slide film and shooting a couple of rolls, I was disappointed.  While my first rolls through my new SLR had been a huge improvement over my point and shoot camera results, I could not initially see the same leap with slide film.  Far from it, many shots looked flat and rather dull.  Upon doing some research, I found that the exposure latitude of slide film is quite small compared to negative film.  This effectively means that getting the exposure spot on becomes much more important.  Print film is more forgiving, firstly because it has a wider "sensitivity" than slide film anyway - around seven stops, compared to slide film's five.  Secondly, there is an intermediate process step with negative film which is of course printing.  At the print stage, the printing machine in the lab will further correct how dark or light the image on the print will be.  This means that you could shoot a negative that is not so well exposed, but still receive a print back from the lab that looks pretty good.  With slide film, this is not the case.  The slide strips you get back from the lab are cut from the roll of film that went through your camera that have of course been developed.  There is no extra process step through which the lab make improvements.

You can see the importance of getting exactly the correct exposure in the two images below. Here I was a little unsure of what was going to be spot on, so shot one image at around the meter's recommended setting, and then a second half or one stop (I can't remember exactly) over the meter's indication.  You can see in the image with a slightly higher exposure that this has made a fairly significant difference to the colour saturation and the shadow detail.  When I look at the strip of film, the second exposure leaps out at me, whereas the first looks flat and a little average.

(Admittedly, the effect you can see here on these scans is not such a stark difference as I can see on the original slides - I guess the scanner is compensating a little, even though I kept all settings manually the same - you really must try this yourself and see the effect first hand on the slides).

It is of course possible when scanning, to take the flat image into Photoshop and saturate the colours a little to get a similar result.  This is not going to help your slide show on the big screen though!

Be under no delusions, a more expensive camera with a more advanced meter may help a little, but with slide film, knowing your meter and how it reacts to different scenes is the key.  The traditional advice here has always been, shoot a lot of film and note the exposures. I always found this very laborious and half the time could not be bothered to make notes after every shot.

 
There is of course now a shortcut, which is to improve your slide film technique via digital learning:
I noticed the whole issue the most when I bought a 10D. Getting immediate feedback is the quickest way of learning and I found that the 10D's meter gets the exposure wrong - at least not spot on, at least 80 if not 90% of the time.  That big wheel for altering exposure on the back of mid-high level EOS SLR cameras is there for a reason - you need it most of the time!
 

Shooting digitally, the dynamic range of the medium is about the same as slide film - around five stops (with today's technology) and as long as you underexpose and don't wash out highlights, shooting RAW will normally save you if you make exposure errors - see my RAW shooting and Low light technique articles.

With slide film, you do not have such luxuries and if anything, slightly overexposing yields better results.
Shooting digitally has shown me how much compensation to most scenes is needed from what the meter indicates and has taught me not to rely on the meter at all. Despite shooting hundreds if not thousands of slide frames, digital took me a step further in all my photography.  When I started with slide film, I got maybe 4 - 7 well exposed frames per roll.  Since using digital and going back to slide, I now typically get 30-34 well exposed frames - sometimes with a little bracketing.

One final tip I would give that I found helps, is to use centre weighted average metering if your SLR has several options.  Many manufacturers will advise that their matrix metering is the best thing available, but I have found centre weighted average is a much more predictable starting point from which to judge how much compensation is necessary.  There is a reason why the latest Leica rangefinders use this type of metering and I tend to agree that it's the best way to go.  You can try the same if you have a 10D or something similar - use the centre weighted metering and then transfer your normal exposure compensation to a more manual camera with slide film. There may be some difference in the meters, but it will only take you a few rolls to see how much and the technique will still work.

I like seeing those big projected images and with projector technology still a long way from matching a projected slide, I will be working with a mix of slide and digital for the foreseeable future.