Colour!

A few weeks ago I spotted someone selling a single roll of Velvia 100 on eBay. It had a single bid, but it was still at £1 (plus postage), so I waited until the last minute for a sneaky snipe and managed to buy it for the princely sum of £1.04. With postage it came to less than £4. It was listed as expired, but as it was unboxed there was no way to know how expired it might be and, for that matter, how it might have been stored. Still, for the price, I wasn’t too worried and even entertained the idea of having it cross-processed. In the end though, I decided against it, and just shot it at 80asa.

When I got the developed transparencies back I was very happy. The whole roll apperared to be well exposed (chalk up a win for the OM-2n’s meter!) and the colours practically leapt from the sheet with richly saturated tones. To be honest, I wouldn’t be surprised to find that the roll of film was fresh stock.

As with other rolls of E6 film, it took some tweaking during the scanning configuration and in Lightroom (and Photoshop) to get the scans looking like the actual transparencies, but I think it was worth the effort (and I now have the settings saved for future use – I’ve just bought four more rolls of expired Velvia 100!).

I’ll be posting a whole bunch of the results here in the coming days, but for now, here’s a photo of a car tail-light that was catching some morning sunshine. It might not be the best composition ever, but man, look at those colours!

Olympus OM-2n, Zuiko Auto-S 50mm f/1.8 & Fujichrome Velvia 100.

Taken on 2 August 2020