Every wonder why people bothered with slides? It’s a valid question.
I mean, you had to drag out the slide projector, set up your record player (yes, record player) to play music to the slides, and come up with a story to narrate the show.
And usually it bored everyone senseless.
Well, there actually were a lot of benefits to slides. How else could you show 140 photos (the standard amount) to a group of people? Pass around a photo album? Remember, this was before the days of using Facebook to share photos.
They were easy to store. They took up less space and didn’t easily tear or get crumpled.
They never faded – well, not as much as prints, anyway.
But the real benefit to slides was seen way earlier, when you were taking the photo.
Reversal films (slides) produce much richer color saturation than negative film (prints). So you often saw much more vibrant colors with slide photos.
stacks of color reversal film slides
That’s not all. Reversal film does not go through the printing process. The film you exposed is processed onto those holders. What you shot in your camera, or more to the point, how you exposed the film is what you see in the slide.
There is no middleman. Even if you exposed perfect prints on negative film, they could be over or underexposed in the processing. Not so with reversal films.
This made it a great way to learn photography. So long as you took a good log of your exposures, you could learn from your mistakes and improve your skills.
Now, with digital photography, we get instant feedback from our LCD screen and can get a feel for whether a photo was over or under exposed. (Usually, we just check to see if we cut off the subject’s head though).
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