Fuji Velvia

Velvia was a brand of colour reversal find produced by Japanese company Fujifilm. As a film stock, Velvia was well known for its very high level of colour saturation and image quality. Introduced in 1990 as a competitor to Kodachrome its sales rocketed creating somewhat of a commercial battle between Fujifilm and Kodak in the industry standard for high definition colour film.

Compared to Kodachrome and Ektachrome its colour representation is understood to be far more brighter however due to its much more higher colour saturation in compassion to Kodak's the image representation is much more unrealistic. With this new colour representation, finer gain, faster film speed (x2 faster) and a more convenient development process (The E-6 process) Kodachrome sales dropped dramatically; eventually leading to the ceasing of its production.

This is my favorite example of Veliva super 8 film. Velvia, like in this example, has highly saturated colours in daylight with a high contrast and sharper picture. Compared to Kodak, Fujfilm has a more cooler palette of colours in its image representation, making it more popular with naturalistic pieces of photography and film. This Kodak and Fujifilm comparison shall be discussed further in this blog. Due to high saturation of Velvia it is considered overdone by some photographers. In particular those who don't primarily shoot naturalistic pictures. Its tendency to oversaturate skin tones makes it not suited for portraits, as it gives pink or brown skin a red colour cast.

Like with many of the super 8 formats Fujifilm was discontinued in 2005 due to a decrease in demand, and also the fact that it was a niche format for its different style of colour representation. However some small companies do still produce it;

After the discontinuation of Kodachrome by Kodak, this caused a serious problem for many amateur shooters, since some Super 8 cameras can't adjust themselves to the film speed of other Kodak film. Many perfectly good cameras were suddenly unusable. Spectra Film & Video in North Hollywood has a solution: Fuji Velvia 50 daylight balanced color reversal film in Super 8 cartridges. Velvia exposes properly in cameras designed for the old Kodachrome film. It also offers extremely fine grain and vibrant color reproduction.

"The picture obtained from this film is quite impressive. And, as a reversal projection film, it still maintains the "vintage" look we all love. Reversal films have a unique, surreal color and contrast that cannot be duplicated in any other medium. People relate the reversal film look to past experiences because news reel footage, documentaries, sports footage, home movies and more were all shot with it as recently as the 80s." - Spectra's President, Doug Thomas 

 The result...

A nice re-creation of a stock that no longer exists. As you can see the saturation of the colours is very high and accurate of the characteristics of Fujifilm Velvia. However one part of the image representation that has changed is that the Velvia stock that Spectra produces has been reconfigured to have a better balance of lubricant to minimize jitter.

In summary to this post Velvia crossed over two era's in super 8, the first was as a competitor to Kodachrome, providing an alternative in style and practicality whilst it also had to compete with the release of Ektachrome, the format which later became the successor to Kodachrome. Although commercially it was never as successful as Kodak its style caused a craze in still and motion picture film making, which now seems to of been re-discovered in the current rise of Lo-fi photography and companies emulating old super 8 film stocks.