Well, I finally got the Kodachrome back that I shot during my recent adventure on Amtrak's Empire Builder -- and most of the images really fail to excite me.
The photos are OK as a visual record, but I guess I'd been expecting some of that sunny-day Kodachrome magic. Trouble is, there weren't all that many sunny days on my 2-1/2 day trip, and the few times I did see some sun, swift-moving clouds often blocked a shot.
These two photos illustrate the dilemma I faced. As the Empire Builder pulled into Glasgow, Montana, I quickly snapped a photo of a grain elevator with my iPhone's 3-megapixel camera. I then pulled out the Nikon FM2n loaded with Kodachrome 64 and grabbed a shot.
The top image here is from the iPhone. I post-processed the photo in an application called CameraBag, and I think the result does a good job of conveying the scene.
In terms of post processing, the app mostly added the vignetting and boosted the contrast. The actual brightness was the same as the original exposure. Because the iPhone lacks a manual override, any scene with a bright or light-colored background, like the clouds here, causes the scene to be underexposed.
By the time I pressed the shutter button on the FM2n, the train had moved to a slightly different position and clouds obscured the sun. The Nikon's 50mm lens offers a considerably less-wide field of view, as well. During manual exposure, I compensated for the underexposure. After I got the Kodachrome scans back from Dwayne's Photo, I tried tweaking the levels in Photoshop, but this is basically the best I could come up with without extreme intervention
In other words, contrary to that Paul Simon song, Kodachrome does not make the world a sunny day. It needs a sunny day.
And by the way, I hate that song.
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