Slide Film and Nicolas Cage Movies
If you know me, you’ll know that I love shooting slide, or transparency film. I enjoy the vivid colors, which work well for the landscape scenes that I tend to photograph. Specifically, I have been a very consistent user of Fujifilm transparency films, Velvia 50 and Provia 100F. I would reckon that eighty to ninety percent of my recent work has been made on one of those two film stocks.
Velvia is the photographic equivalent of a Nicolas Cage movie. At its worst, it can leave a lot to be desired, but when it’s good, it’s really, really good. What do I mean by that? Velvia has an exceptionally narrow dynamic range, perhaps four to five stops. That means it can only capture a very narrow range of light, far less than what the human eye can see. It is also a very saturated, colorful film. As a result, shooting it in broad daylight, like during the middle of the day, yields over-the-top, contrasty results that make the photos look bad paintings.
However, for every bad Nick Cage movie (say, Left Behind or Arsenal—not the football club, but that works too), there are also hidden gems (The Rock or Face/Off). So it is with Velvia 50. In the subdued light of golden or blue hour, the film comes to life. Its vividly saturated colors work well to capture the kaleidoscope of orange and purple light that lights up the sky and its surrounding landscapes twice each day. For this reason, Velvia was the go-to film for many professional landscape photographers during the 1990s and early-2000s.
Provia, on the other hand, works well with a wider range of scenes. It exchanges the punchiness of Velvia for a more true-to-life color palette. It also has a more forgiving dynamic range, meaning photos taken in harsher light don’t quite have the same deep shadows and blown out highlights that can make Velvia seem garish. Provia is probably akin to—and yes, I know I’m stretching this extended metaphor well past its breaking point—a Tom Hanks movie. Most of the time you know you’ll get a movie that will please critics and audiences. For those reasons, it has become my go-to film for landscapes outside of the twenty minutes before and after sunrise and sunset that I reserve mainly for Velvia.
However, the future of these two films looks uncertain. Fujifilm, in its infinite wisdom, chose to cease production of Velvia 50 sheet film last year, an action that, in the past, presaged a complete discontinuation of a film. Provia’s future looks a little more hopeful, but it too may go the way of the dodo bird. To make matters worse, the company recently announced price hikes of twenty to sixty percent for their film, pushing the cost Velvia and Provia well north of twenty dollars a roll. Those prices would hurt quite a bit, except both films (at least in the 35mm format that I shoot) have remained consistently out of stock at most retailers. Velvia and Provia have become scarcer than toilet paper and hand sanitizer in March 2020.
That leaves me with the only other transparency film on the market, Kodak Ektachrome 100. It had been my slide film of choice for quite a while when I first dived into analog photography. But I noticed a few issues with it. Scenes shot on Ektachrome tends to look quite blue (as seen in the photo below of El Capitan), especially when photographing shaded areas. My photographs often seemed a bit dim, even though I thought I had exposed them correctly. These reasons, combined with the fact that I started to really enjoy using Velvia and Provia, meant that Ektachrome became a backup that I used sparingly--usually during the few times I got bored of using the first two films.
Back in March, I read a wonderfully informative article from my friend Alex Burke about shooting Ektachrome 100. Alex had encountered similar issues with the film as I had. He had done quite a bit of testing on the film and suggested rating it at ISO 80 or 64 instead of the 100 indicated on the box; in other words, overexposing the film by a third to two-thirds of a stop. He also mentioned using a warming filter to combat the cool tones of the film. After reading the article, I eyed the dwindling supply of increasingly expensive Velvia and Provia in my fridge and decided that now would be a great time to try out his recommendations on the cheaper and more easily available Ektachrome. I bought a Tiffen 812 filter, loaded my camera with the film, and set out to try it. Since I did not have enough time last month to take a weekend trip to Yosemite or the eastern Sierra, I decided to test the film with some scenes close to home. On my first attempt, I decided to hike the Seaview Trail out in Tilden Regional Park, located in the Berkeley foothills, in search of some wildflowers.
That first outing did not go according to plan. I dramatically underestimated the strenuousness of the uphill climb and only had enough time to make it partway up the trail. I found an overlook that appeared promising and set up a wide-angle composition there. Then as the coastal fog rolled in, I decided to switch to a telephoto lens to find some close-ups of the incoming clouds. Unfortunately, the Nikkor 70-300mm f/4.5-5.6 AF-S lens I brought had a 67mm filter thread, while my 812 filter had a 52mm one. I should’ve packed my 75-150mm Series E zoom that shares the same 52mm width as the filter. Nevertheless, I figured I might as well roll with it, and snapped away as the sun set. As the light grew dimmer, I encountered some difficulty balancing the shutter speed with the small aperture I needed to keep the image relatively sharp. I had mounted my camera on a tripod, but I worried that the fast-moving clouds might appear blurry with the longer exposures. Despite my concerns, the resulting images turned out well. Though I would’ve preferred a warming filter in front of my lens to counteract the cooler colors, the photos still look well-balanced and close to how the scene appeared before my eyes.
That following weekend, I decided to go to Mount Tamalpais for another sunset, but that too did not proceed according to plan. I napped in the car and slept too long to explore the area before the sunset. In a frenzied rush, I drove out to a trailhead I had hiked before and ran frantically down the trail with my camera bag as the fog rolled in and the sun dipped towards the horizon. Despite my best efforts, I arrived at my intended viewpoint too late to see the sun as it disappeared below the horizon. I chalked up the trip as a bit of a bust and resolved to not oversleep next time. Therefore, I was pleasantly surprised when I received my film scans a few weeks later and realized that I had a keeper from that day. I had snapped this picture of some hikers standing atop the ridgeline, thinking of it as nothing more than a record shot on my way towards a better scene.
I had the opposite experience the next weekend. I arrived at Mount Tam earlier this time and spent the afternoon scouting potential photo opportunities. Finally, I decided on a dense patch of lupines on a hillside. I waited for sunset, metered the scene multiple times, and bracketed several exposures with several different graduated filter/warming filter combinations. I felt confident with the composition and thought I had sufficiently covered my bases with multiple exposures. I couldn’t imagine anything going wrong with how the pictures would turn out. Unfortunately, when I received my film scans, I noticed that the filter combination I used caused some vignetting in every single shot. I hadn’t anticipated that possibility; I never noticed any vignetting before on my 20mm lens. It appeared that the warming filter wasn’t quite wide enough for the lens. Though some simple edits in Lightroom mitigated some of the vignetting, it didn’t completely disappear.
With my Mount Tam shots seemingly wrapped up, I focused on returning to Tilden Park to look for some wildflowers again. I chose a weekday afternoon after a rainstorm to hike the trail and found a mix of California poppies and lupines lining the open hillsides along the trail. I photographed several scenes that day, but I’m most proud of a shot of some lupine bushes overlooking the San Francisco Bay. That lighting situation was a bit difficult. The sky was about three to four-stops brighter than the foreground, and I used both 2-stop and 3-stop hard-edged graduated ND filters to keep the exposure relatively even. I decided against using soft-edged filters because of the visible horizon, but that also meant that the transition shows up more noticeably in the picture. In the first shot, taken with a 3-stop filter, you can just barely see the hard-edge of the filter as it cuts across some trees. It is less obvious in the second exposure, where I used a 2-stop filter. Despite the harsher transition, I think I prefer the first photo, where the dimmer sky contrasts well with the flowers.
I decided to return the next morning to hike the trail from the other direction to see what wildflowers I could find there. The morning started off dim and cloudy. I hiked out from the trailhead in darkness, barely able to see the trail in front of me. Once the sun rose above the horizon, fog rolled in and covered it. bathing the hills in a warm glow that would disappear or reappear depending on the thickness of the clouds. Whenever the light reappeared, I would use those few minutes to set up a shot.
For the scene below, I felt mostly satisfied with it, but thought the power lines a bit distracting. I attempted a composition that cropped out the power lines by aiming the camera down, but the perspective shift made the bend in the trail look slightly out of place.
In total, I used up three rolls of Ektachrome. I came away from the experience quite pleased at the results. The color rendition worked quite well for warmer scenes. In overcast conditions, the warming filter only partially prevented the scene from looking blue. However, that issue also comes up with Provia and Velvia, and I thought the Ektachrome results looked quite comparable to what I usually get in similar conditions from the first two films. I rated all the rolls at ISO 80, and the warming filter I used also cut another two-thirds of a stop of light from reaching the lens, so practically speaking, I was shooting the film at ISO 50. I found that to be spot on for the lighting situations I encountered. Almost every single one of the exposures from my three rolls looked perfect. However, that lower film speed also meant that I could not be as mobile. I had to use a tripod often when fading light and the need to maintain depth of field necessitated longer shutter speeds. In the future, I’ll likely treat Ektachrome a bit like how I treat Velvia 50—a film best used for more stationary situations.
Though I’m quite satisfied with these results, I do still worry about the long-term viability of transparency film. As mentioned earlier, there are only three options currently available on the market (four if you count Retrochrome 400, but that is a repackaged expired film). With Fujifilm giving mixed signals for the past few years about its willingness to continue film production, that leaves Kodak as the only real game in town.
Shooting slide film may be a quixotic endeavor at a time when the vast majority of new film shooters understandably gravitate towards the easier learning curve and more affordable prices of negative film. Transparency film has become a niche item within a niche hobby. In an ideal world, Kodak would bring back old slide films like Ektachrome 100VS or the legendary Kodachrome. At a bare minimum, I would love it if Fujifilm merely continued to make Velvia 50 and Provia 100F, even if I had to pay twenty bucks a roll. But I concede that I do not live in that ideal world, and that these films may have an uncertain long-term future as long as transparency film remains a niche and expensive choice. In the meantime, I’ll continue to use it as much as I can. If Velvia and Provia disappear, I may finally understand how Paul Simon felt when they took his Kodachrome away, but I can at least be confident that I would enjoy the results Ektachrome can give.