It has a definite and very different response to light hitting it than any digital sensor (yes, yes you can approximate it in digital blah, blah, blah). It's beautiful in a way that is hard for me to describe
There is a lot of truth to this, and what makes it interesting to me is that in a sense you make a decision before pressing the shutter about what the final result might look like.
Certain emulsions have very distinctive looks about them.
Many folks wax poetically about Kodachrome. When I was a high school kid with his first SLR in 2005, I'd read about this mythical/legendary stuff and bought a couple of rolls of it on my first trip to a real camera store. I also bought the same number of rolls of Velvia(original Velvia, not Velvia 100 or the reincarnated Velvia 50).
I loaded up a roll in my Canon T90 and went out excitedly to photograph the Tulips down at the Capitol(always a big thing in Kentucky, and something I have years of) plus some other colorful and exciting things.
My first roll came back and my response was...well...what's so special about this stuff? It was fresh, in date, cold stored Kodachrome 64, processed promptly by arguably the best Kodachrome lab in the world(actually one of I think 3 at the time), Dwayne's Photo. It was dull, drab, and just boring to me.
That same day, I'd also shot a roll of Velvia. It came back at the same time from the same lab, and it was jaw dropping. I'd never seen color like that in a photo I'd taken. I was new to slide shooting at the time so was making do with an old handheld slide viewer, but still it blew me away.
I kept it up with Kodachrome, and eventually something would hit "right" on its color palette. Other times, I'd go in thinking that something would render well on it, and some of my later Kodachromes I shot were a lot more satisfying than those first ones. From then on, though, it was mostly Velvia to me, although I've returned some to the very clean and less over the top E100/E100G.
Still, though, it's funny how that sticks with you. I will be browsing through old photos online, or an article that has old photos spaced through it, and I'll have a reaction of "That's Kodachrome" on certain ones. I've yet to be wrong when the film stock was indicated on the photo. It's hard to explain what I see, but the best I could describe it is that all the colors tend to "block up", and most any red is rendered with a certain distinctive "Kodachrome Red".
Velvia of course has its own color palette quirks. Most of the people photos I have that have been taken on Velvia are of caucasian people, and I tend to avoid showing the subjects their photos just because most folks don't like seeing a photo of their face pink or even red. Still, though, the selective warming of yellow to a golden yellow type color is like nothing else.
