There’s a bit of a story with this gallery as I was hoping to shoot some rolls of Velvia 50 I’d just picked up a couple of days earlier. Velvia 50 is color-reversal slide film (so the film aren’t negatives, they’re positives!) with truly obnoxious color saturation.
So I’m driving along to Asheville when suddenly I had a rather disquieting thought after having gone through the mental inventory of what I had packed. Nikon F5 film camera? Check. Tons of AA batteries that it’ll eat through like candy? Yep. Velvia 50 film?
Yep…five rolls sitting in the refrigerator in the garage back home in Raleigh where I had left them!
#@#*%!!
Fortunately, there was a camera store literally two blocks away from the hotel where I was staying. Unfortunately, they didn’t have any Velvia 50 but they did have some Provia 100F.
Here is a sample gallery showing the differences between Provia and something approximating the look Velvia 50 (it’s not true Velvia 50, nothing really comes close to it except the real film!).
What you’re seeing here is the scans from the slides that were processed by North Coast Photographic Services in Carlsbad, CA as there are no local labs in Raleigh who process E-6 slide film any more. The processing, mounting of the slides, and the enhanced scans were not cheap…but they were well worth it as the photos turned out beautifully.
That my friends is why I still shoot film even with five digital cameras that came along for the ride on that trip. And the nice thing is that I’ve still got four rolls of Provia 100F to play with and the full five rolls of Velvia 50 that I’m planning on using on a sunrise at the Hatteras lighthouse at some point.
