New York & California Photo & Publishing

The most frequent question that I have been asked as a photographer is what films do I use to shoot nature & impressionistic pictures.

Although in today’s digital age, high end cameras like Nikon D300 or Nikon D3 can produce impeccable large print digital images, I still love the details & the natural saturation of Fuji films.

I always use slide films, also called chromes. And mostly, I use Fujichrome & Fuji Velvia. For a short while I had used Agfa Scala for black & white nature & people shots, but then, unfortunately, Agfa Scala 200 was discontinued.

Before you use Fuji Velvia, you have to run your own tests to understand how the film reacts to the camera settings. The reason being that if your exposure is -/+ 0.5 ev off your shot is ruined.

Ken Rockwell ran his tests to show how Velvia 50 performs. But the test is very simple. You load your camera with Fuji Velvia 50 & run a test shot on a gray card (preferably 18%) at -1 ev, -0.5 ev, 0 ev, + 0.5 ev & +1.0 ev  exposures. These are your control shots. You need these to compare other pictures that you would shoot.

Next shoot a series of green, red, blue, yellow scenes (like flowers, landscapes, still objects) with one of these predominant colors as well as combination. Remember to shoot at -1 through +1 EV at intervals of 0.5 EV.

Develop these test shots at normal exposure. Then compare how each of them stands against the control tests (performed earlier with 18% gray). You can see which exposure of Fuji Velvia 50 works best for your camera.

So instead of going by a standard of -0.5 ev like many photographers do, you could run your own simple test for Fuji Velvia & see which exposure suits your camera. When I ran this test on my Nikon F-100 & Nikon F5, I found that I did not need any adjustments at all. I run most of my exposures at 0 EV exposure override when shooting with Fuji Velvia 50.

You need to run similar film exposure tests with either a new film (make or speed) or a new camera.