Fuji Velvia 50
© 2007 KenRockwell.com

New Velvia 50 sitting on top of classic Velvia.

I buy my Velvia from this link to Adorama. I also I get my goodies at Ritz and Amazon. It helps me keep adding to this site when you get yours from those links, too.

Nomenclature

Velvia, introduced in 1990 and out of production by 2005, was always ISO 50, and was called simply "Velvia," edge code RVP.

Fuji's new 2007 version is called Velvia 50, edge code RVP 50.

The original doesn't have 50 in its name, the new replacement does.

When I say Velvia, I mean the original film, not the Velvia family.

When I say Velvia 50, I mean the new 2007 product, not the original.

There is also a very different Velvia 100 and Velvia 100F, neither of which are discussed below.

September 2007

Now that I've gotten to shoot several rolls in various formats, I really like the new Velvia 50. It really does seem to be the same as my old stock of Velvia.

Velvia 50 takes warm colors and warms them even further, just as Velvia did.

Warm orange sunlight on stone will tend to get redder or pinker. Orange turns towards red. This is the very pleasant effect which made Velvia the standard for landscape photographer back in 1990 through today.

Of course people tend to look too red; but this never has been a film for people. It's a film for things.

July 2007

Thankfully from what little I've seen so far, new Velvia 50 looks the same, especially in yellows, as the original Velvia. HOORAY!!! New Velvia 50 appears to be the real thing, not the watered down Velvia 100F or cooler Velvia 100.

The new boxes say "Velvia 50" in gold metallic ink, while the original boxes said "Velvia" in hot-stamped shiny gold foil (which looks black on my flatbed scan above because the light reflected away from it).

Background

Velvia is the reason I am still a photographer. Most of what you see at my Gallery is shot on it, not digital. My real photographer friends, like Alethea Steingisser, are still out backpacking with their Pentax 67s and Velvia today in 2007, bringing digital cameras only as a joke. It's all about the look: Velvia simply makes landscapes and nature look the way we want it to.

I started at age 11 in 1973 shooting Kodachrome because it was such an elegant film, based only on technical specifications. My photos were boring, and I almost gave up on photography by the late 1980s.

In 1990 my colleague Mark Sauerwald suggested I try some of this new Japanese stuff called Velvia, whose colors were simply spectacular. No one trusted it back then, an old timers like another colleague Frank Brunner warned me about the old days (1950s) when people would try the latest, more vivid films instead of Kodachrome, and discover a year later that their Anscochromes or whatever were faded away.

Since I also was moving from 35mm to 4x5" I needed to use a film available in 4x5," which was Velvia and not Kodachrome.

I exposed my first frame of Velvia on July 9th, 1990, and was astounded. My slides now looked as vivid as I had always intended. Instead of amplifying atmospheric haze, Velvia ate right through it. Velvia amped up the colors to where they should be, not as they were.

Today my 17-year-old Velvia slides still look like the day the came back from the lab, which is a lot better than my Kodachromes have ever looked. Sorry Frank. I haven't put the film ends on a densitometer to measure just how identical they are, but I could.

I was hooked, and have shot nothing but Velvia from that point on. My work excited me and I kept at photography, instead of dropping it due to the disappointing green-cyan highlights and pinholes in my Kodachromes.

Why the New Version?

Velvia was the last of Fuji's films that used an older type of clear plastic film, the "base," on which the layers were coated. All Fuji's films since 1990 have been on a different, newer, better base, while classic Velvia used the old one from the 1980s. For about the past 15 years Velvia has been their only film made on this obsolete base.

In 2003 Fuji introduced Velvia 100F, a film improved in almost every way, but with somewhat less vivid color. The only thing that matters is color, so 100F never became popular for landscape and nature photography for which Velvia has been the standard since 1990.

I met one of Velvia's original designers, who explained to me with great pride around 2003 that in Velvia 100F he finally had fixed one of the original technical defects of Velvia.

This defect was that Velvia adds red to warm colors. Yellows become slightly redder, oranges turn toward red and skin gets ruddy.

The only huge problem is that this defect is what gives Velvia its extraordinarily great look for landscapes and nature. We photographers are out freezing ourselves to death every sunrise hoping for the warmest first 60 seconds of sunlight to light up rocks against blue skies, and Velvia helps us by warming (improving) the golden sunshine. Velvia makes nature look better!

The old base of Velvia involved some tricky manufacturing, and became undoable by about 2004, so by 2005 Fuji discontinued Velvia hoping we'd be happy with Velvia 100 (2005) and Velvia 100F.

Since almost all printing involved scanning, I figured I could use Velvia 100 and warm up the yellows in Photoshop to match Velvia. I also kept, and still have, a strategic reserve of Velvia in deep freeze. I shoot less film today since you people keep wanting me to write about digital, so I have enough to last many years.

Well, even if we can fix it in Photoshop, Velvia 100 still doesn't look as good sitting on the light table, so we all petitioned for the real thing.

When Fuji heard the outcry for the original Velvia, they did the right thing and went back and redesigned the original coatings to work with the new base. As I hear it, the only thing that's changed with Velvia 50 is the plastic backing, not the coatings other than what modifications were needed to get them to stick to the different base.

July 2007: Fuji Velvia 50

Lo and behold, faster than Nikon can create the D3X, Fuji has reintroduced Fuji Velvia 50, and from the very few shots I've been able to make on my limited samples, it looks great.

The ISO 50 versions are my favorites because I prefer their warmer yellows. Velvia makes skin too red, but makes yellows look wonderful. Velvia is for photographing things, not people. Velvia is not accurate - it makes landscapes look better than reality, which is why it's been the world standard for landscape and nature photography since 1990. Most of my Gallery is shot on Velvia.

Here's a crappy scan of three 120 format strips. I shot these in the same camera with different backs. I laid the three strips of film, still in their sleeves, on my Epson 4990 scanner to try to show what's the same and and what's different. (I've had Chrome process all my Velvia since 1990; they also do mail order.)

My biggest concern is warm yellows, my favorite color, which were uniquely rendered by traditional Velvia. Warm yellow means yellow with some red in it. A warm yellow hibiscus bloomed at my house, seen here under overcast light with an 81B glass filter to fix white balance.

This is a bad scan, but it shows what little it can to show you what I see on the light table: new Velvia 50's yellows match traditional Velvia. Other films, like Velvia 100 below, render yellows too coolly, even if they may be more accurate.

Velvia, Velvia 50 and Velvia 100 Compared.

(Made with my Horseman SW-612P interchangeable-back, medium format panoramic camera and 90mm f/6.8 Rodenstock Grandagon, 81B filter, f/8 @ 1/30 [f/11 for Velvia 100] in windy, overcast conditions. Sorry that since I first published this as a vertical composite that I whacked off the top of the Velvia RVP strip, now filled in black above in this sideways triptych.)

On the light table, the new and old Velvias have the same warm yellow, while Velvia 100 has a cooler yellow. The warmer yellow is why I love traditional Velvia. The old and new Velvia 50 seem identical, within the limits of my ability to swap out magazines as clouds blew around. My original Velvia is past-dated, and it tends to go magenta with age. I think I'm seeing a little bit of that here - on my light table what doesn't match is more magenta cast in my old Velvia. I remember 1990 when Velvia first came out: it tended towards green until Fuji really dialed it in.

Don't spend any more time trying to analyze these images above other than to note that the warm yellows match, and that Velvia 100 is cooler. If you look too hard; you'll be seeing artifacts of my scanning, not what's really on the film in front of me.

dMax

dMax also looks identical on my first test rolls. New Velvia 50 has the same inky, vivid blacks as traditional Velvia. This makes it pop on a light table and projected, and also makes it better than many consumer scanners. Velvia 100 has a weaker (less dark) dMax than either of Velvia or Velvia 50.

Film Speed

I haven't gotten enough samples to make a valid comparison, but from the first roll I tried I suspect that Velvia 50 may be about 1/3 stop faster than Velvia.

This means I'm going to shoot my next roll at ISO 64 instead of 50, and if you shot Velvia at 40 you might want to try ISO 50.

2007's Velvia Line

Velvia (RVP): ISO 50, made 1990 - 2006 (no longer available new). I keep a strategic reserve in my freezer. This is the classic film which has been the standard for landscape photography for a decade or two.

Velvia 50 (RVP 50): This is today's 2007 reintroduction of the original Velvia. It is claimed to be an exact replacement for the original Velvia.

Velvia 100 (RVP 100): This is the good stuff the Japanese held back for themselves for a few years. It's as vivid as Velvia, faster, finer grained and much better for skin and long exposures. It's better for skin because it doesn't turn warm colors redder as Velvia does, which is why Velvia 100 still doesn't look as good as Velvia for landscapes and still doesn't replace original Velvia.

Velvia 100F (RVP 100F): A duller and less warm version of Velvia 100.

PLUG

If you find this as helpful as a book you might have had to buy or a workshop you may have had to take, feel free to help me continue helping everyone.

Thanks for reading!

Ken

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