I was down to Bonaire last month and tried a few rolls of the new Velvia 100. All of the shots were with an Aquatica housed 8008s, 16mm lens, and SB105 X 2. Even though I only shot a few rolls, I would have to say that I was very pleased with the performance of this film. I really liked the background blue. Take a look.

http://dive.scubadiving.com/members/photog...ries.php?s=4222

Larry

Some nice stuff there, particularly like the silverside school under the pier. I'm going to take 5 rolls of this to Grand Cayman next month to see how it works for me. The background blues, as you say, look very pleasing.

Very Very nice work, Larry. I'll bet they look nice on the wall!

I'm taking plenty of V100 on the Manado trip (It arrived too late for the last one!) to shoot through the 90x's.
Did you try any macro with it?

Looking at the first photo, the one with the sun, brings up a question I have about the dynamic range of slides which I've often been told is much better than digital, especially the consumer digital with the small Sony chips. If this shot is any indication, I would now doubt those claims. Just based on the area of the white sun ball and the water that's completely black at the right, I think my Olympus 5050 could have done just as well.

I think that's loss of dynamic range from the scanner Herb. I bet the slides look a lot better.

Cheers
James

That could be true. Although most scanners are much better than that.

Herb.

I dumped one particular scanner for doing the same thing. The 11 Mp up units have a radical dynamic range. You are also right about the dynamic ranges improving on the 5050/5000 etc. especially in the hands of a tallented individual, as we see quite often here on WP.

Pity there is no E6 on the boat

From what I've read, films have about 10 stops of light sensitivity but they compress that to about 7 stops of resulting dynamic range by being nonlinear in both shadows and highlights. The output dynamic range is comparable to digital.

Digital is linear over its range so it is less tolerant of high contrast images even though its output capability is comparable to film.

There's no way to compare the actual dynamic range of a slide to digital on a web page since you are converting it to digital! Still, scanners are capable of very high dynamic range.

So, I think it's correct to say that film has greater dynamic range than digital (currently) but also that herb's observations are correct. Additionally, I believe film's nonlinear response in highlights varies between red, green, and blue and that may contribute to it's excellent performance in blue water and into-the-sun shooting.

James is right, the slide has much more detail in the sunburst. Because I used such a wide lens, the range of the background is huge. I use a Nikon Coolscan IV which is fine in most cases but in this instance it falls a little short. I think it does accurately portray the color and detail that you can get from this film and that was what I was trying to show.

Larry

No, I only shot wide-angle. I use E100VS for my macro stuff but on this trip i was using a C5050Z.

I just returned from Lembeh last week, and used Velvia 100 for the first time - shooting macro exclusively I got through 20 rolls.

I have now gotten them back from the developers and I am very happy (very)- I can see no difference between the 100 and the 50, indeed the 100 shots seem "crisper" than my previous 50 shots and retain the warmth and depth of colour through the loupe- the additional fstop it afforded me gave me quite a bit of latitude to try and push fstops further and shooting f22 and f32 for 80% of the trip I had no underexposures (except for distancing errors due to myself). I don't know too much about the technicalities of film but I won't be buying anymore 50, I will now stick to the 100

Here's an example: the specs for Ektachrome E100G can be found here:

http://www.kodak.com/global/en/professiona...024/e4024.jhtml

and the dynamic range can be estimated from this graph:



The input is plotted on the horizontal axis. It's a log scale so each unit is a factor of ten. 10 stops is 2^10 = 1000 or 3 units. I'd say it's a stretch (pun intended ) to give it that much.

I love the shot of the fish and shrimp. Must be a story there somewhere.

Yes, that is an awesome shot! Are they on a bubble coral? Why is the fish "cozying up" to the shrimp?

Interesting!

James

I am not really sure what kind of soft coral they are on, it is in the bottom of a rusting tin can - I noticed the shrimp and moved in and then noticed the Dinah's goby at the back of the can - when I started taking pictures of the shrimp the goby went ballistic and was darting aroung everywhere - and this is a lucky shot. Over the trip we found a lot of Dinah's gobies going ballistic and on closer inspection they were all protecting eggs - like this one that had laid it eggs in a patch of flambouyant cuttlefish eggs



Velia 100 and Lembeh is a trip I need to make again