>>3975391>can you give some general advice about subjects that look good with that kind of film? I bought a roll of Velvia to give it a try, but it's been in my fridge for a year because I'm so afraid to make a mess of it.Slides like Velvia can burn your hands very quickly if you never used them before.
Sure they look amazing on a light table when properly exposed, but they work best in specific conditions such as reflected light.
I'm not a fan of slides, because most of my scenes don't fit. Velvia's DR is limited to maybe 6-7 stops and becomes messy in strong shadows making them basically impossible to recover with a flatbed.
A spotmeter is mandatory with transparencies, unless you have a mirrorless or something.
I love the flexibility of color negatives, you can do much more with it, but it comes at the cost of learning how to properly convert it into a decent image. I think this is what scares people off the most?
There are some tools for conversion but I never trusted them, I scan the negatives as positives and work my way manually.
So I'd say go with Velvia50 (rip) for reflected light and intimate scenes, Provia/Ektachrome for the same thing but also they have slightly more latitude so they work fine for dawns/sunsets, Ektar for punchy colors and compositions in direct sunlight but expose it at box speed, Portra for subtle tones and generally everything else. Portra 160 can look a lot like Ektar when exposed at box speed, but looks pretty good even when overexposed.
Pic related is a 25 minutes exposure on portra 160 at box speed.
