Continuing my current pre-occupation with all things film, I thought I'd share this recent experience with some Fuji Velvia 100F.

For those who don't know, Velvia is a colour reversal slide film which when developed becomes a positive transparency, as opposed to an inverted negative. It is known for its fine grain and saturated colours. Sadly, it has now been discontinued but I found a few expired rolls on Ebay some time ago. I bought them and put them away in a drawer.. for like, years. Oops, now even more expired. I think it's now somewhere around ten years out of date, but I don't have the boxes so not sure precisely.

Well, I finally got round to shooting a roll in my old Nikon. Now, there is a rule of thumb which says you should overexpose by one stop for every ten years past it's use by date a given film might be. Ok, no problem. Only thing is, being quite a slow film to start with - 100 iso/asa, this did result in some rather slow shutter speeds under lower light conditions, meaning an increased risk of camera shake and blurry photos. I think you can see this in some of the frames but overall I'm quite pleased with how things turned out.

Being my first and only experience (so far) with this film, I was interested to see what all the fuss was about in relation to colour saturation. I knew the results I would get might be compromised in some way because of it's age, and I think that is the case. There are a couple of frames which show it nicely, but a lot of the rest seem a little flat to me. Not unpleasant, far from it, just not perhaps as saturated as things might've been.

Over all I'm happy that the film is useable. I have three more rolls of it in the fridge. All I need to do is decide where and when to use it... :)

See what you think.