Ken Rockwell (of www.kenrockwell.com) once said “Velvia is the reason I am still a photographer”. Holy crap, I can see why this is true.
I wasn’t sure how great it could be, so I obtained a couple rolls through my favourite place (eBay), and while they happened to be expired (2005ish) and the old type of Velvia, they were positively incredible. Wonderful wonderful ‘I-want-to-write-home-about-you-right-now’ sort of colours. Yes some of them may have been muted from using the slightly expired film, but where they mattered it was incredible. All processed through genie imaging in London – sadly they don’t do E6 processing in my local super cheap lab in Cambridge (PandIS) – and while cheap comparatively to other labs, bordering on £20 is insane in comparison to processing my own B&W film. That said, I got 36 7×5 prints and them all scanned for that price, so it’s not the worst thing in the world, and considering they have some of the most wonderful pictures I’ve taken in a while contained there then I’m quite happy paying that sort of money.
Anyway, the obvious thing here would be to included a link to the pictures, but alas, sadly, I have not yet uploaded them. That’ll have to wait until mid Tuesday/Wednesday at the earliest sadly. I did take all the photos on an original Pentax Spotmatic, using mainly a 55/1.8 and a few on a 17/4 fisheye. Luckily I do have another roll of the wonderful stuff, and I’m quite tempted to take it on my Canon EOS 5 film SLR. It might even pop out nicer colours than my 5D mark III. Wait and see