Part 1 - Kicking the habit!
When Fuji launched Velvia we became serious addicts. Before that, our pictures were grey and dull. Then, suddenly our landscapes came alive with vivid colours and dramatic skies. OK, so maybe its not quite reality, but it's certainly addictive. We know how every scene will look on Velvia, when to use a ND grad, polariser or an 81b, and when to override or bracket. We can't survive without our weekly fix, just seeing the results always hit the spot - until now.
So how did we kick the habit?
Towards the end of 2002 it was clear to us that Digital Cameras were moving so fast they were challenging the whole future of film. We secretly believed that we were hooked forever, nothing could match a 22Mpixel scan from Velvia, but we thought we had better get on the bandwagon just in case it left without us. We decided to dip our toe in the water and we got a digital compact, the Olympus C4000z. It has an F2.8 zoom lens, manual, aperture and shutter priority operation but only 4Mpixels. All for under £400 quid.
First reactions reinforced all our prejudices. It was more like playing with a gameboy than using a camera! It had none of the usual controls, just buttons and menus all displayed on the LCD screen on the back. The instruction book was about 1000 pages. Still, it snowed heavily in the Peak District just after we got it, so we went out for a shoot with the trusty Nikon/Velvia as the safety net. Using the camera just confirmed the problems, the viewfinder didn't show the whole scene, so we had to adopt the tourist pose of holding the camera at arms length and squinting at the LCD screen. The batteries failed after only 1 hours shooting. Controlling the shutter speed and apertures seemed incredibly clumsy. It looked like we were safe, we could carry on shooting up with Velvia. We did persevere though and took quite a lot of pics. Back home, with Velvia in the post and the C4000 connected to the PC, it was time for a look.
Wow! The pics looked pretty good. Load them into PhotoShop and tweak with the contrast and brightness. Apply some sharpening and try an A3 print. Shock!! The print was amazing. Good detail, no grain and great colours. We tried a few more, all with the same results and great quality, almost instantly. That afternoon, Ben Hawkins from PP emailed us and asked if we had any urban winter pictures for a feature and the deadline was very tight. We put some of the pics from the day's shoot onto CD and sent it. The pics were in the magazine two weeks later! So this wasn't quite 35mm quality but fairly close. What if we used a professional DSLR?
Now we knew we needed to take the plunge. We needed a camera that combined the ease of use of our Nikon SLR's with the instant feedback and potential quality of digital. A few days of frantic comparisons on the Internet along with articles and reviews threw up the 12 Mpixel Fuji S2 Pro immediately as the favourite camera but highlighted a real problem. The smaller CCD size of the existing digital SLR's meant that our favourite wide-angle lenses would be almost useless! The magnification factor increases focal lengths so that lenses appear 1.5 times longer i.e. 20mm becomes 30mm. The Nikon website heralded some hope, with the introduction, soon, of a 12-24mm lens for their digital cameras. We finally plumped for the Fuji after seeing A3 prints from a friends camera that seemed better than medium format! We had the camera in our hands before our Velvia snow pictures came back in the post! Yes, its expensive (~£1600) but a Velvia habit is expensive too.
We had managed to get cheap flights to Brussels and Venice on the two following weekends so this was the opportunity to give the S2 pro a real workout. We still took Velvia and shot with digital and film together. The first impression was much better than the Olympus and the S2 worked just like our film Nikons. But suddenly we could shoot in a different way. The Venice picture on this page is a great example. We took 14 versions of this picture as the light was changing. After each picture we checked the exposure using the histograms on the LCD. You never need to get the exposure wrong again. We also checked just how much movement the Gondolas in the foreground had on each frame. This is really difficult to visualise with film because it's a random combination of the shutter speed and the motion of the water. It's a bit like having a polaroid back that actually captures the final image. On each one of the 14 frames we improved the result a bit more until we felt we had done our best. Yes, we could have shot a roll of Velvia trying to do the same thing but without the instant feedback the results are much less predictable. With the S2 you can also change the ISO rating for each frame. Results up to 800ASA are pretty good.
But there are downsides. The amount of data the camera is generating is vast. A laptop or some other storage device is essential for more than a days shooting. Our Venice weekend produced 5.6Gbytes of data. CDR's seem to be the way to deal with archiving this. At least the laptop allows you to have a slide-show back at the hotel and decide if any pics need re-shooting or deleting.
So, finally the acid test. What about the results! We have printed the Venice picture at A0 size (approx. 33x47 inches). It has no grain and a smoothness of tone which we haven't seen before. It is quite literally, stunning and early indications are that the camera blows 35mm into the weeds. It looks like we have finally kicked the Velvia habit - but the new digital drug has got us hooked already!