ISO 50 Advice?

Hello, I'm Theo. I'm new to the forum but not new to photo. I've been shooting for over 15 years with my trusty Canon AE-1, and I just have a quick question about film. My friend Harrison recently got me to try Fuji Velvia 50. I must say, after going around the city and getting the photos back, they look wonderful!!! Colours are incredibly vibrant and vivid and I am so impressed with my results, and I haven't used any slide film up until this point. As a lifelong New Yorker, I love photographing the subways. Something about it just makes me smile. Now, considering the lighting of both underground and overground stations (both during the day as well as at night), is Velvia 50 apprpropriate for subway photography? Do I need to use flash? Any advice is appreciated.

Thanks!
Theo.

I can follow your enthousiasm about fuji velvia, at least I shared it at the start. When using it more often for landscape, where it’s more or less invented for, I saw more and more disadvantages. It approaches kitsch sometimes in oversaturated greens. I can’t see however, if you love it, why it would not be appropriate for subways. It does not, in my experience, handle fluorescent light any worse than other slide films. And if you scan you can correct the cast, or you can use a magenta correction filter. Flash would be better for that matter but would have too many other disadvantages for me personally. It is already a quite contrast film, with flash it doesn’t get softer

For which I know (at least the) fuji velvia rolls needs adjustments in form of color correction filters when working with long exposures.. and the filter needed differs somewhat depending on how long the exposure is. I'm talking seconds, and longer times in this case.

Subway photos taken with Velvia 50 would be pretty cool...that’s sort of outside it’s box so-to-speak. The speed will limit what you can do, but within that confine it should produce good results.

Velvia is a daylight film so keep that in mind when shooting with flash or under the flourescent lights prevalent in subways.

If the slow speed does turn out to be a limit, you may want to try Provia 100 or even Provia 400 (which is no longer made but will still be good if stored properly). The color saturation is not as high as with Velvia, but flesh tones will have a more natural look.

The darkness in the subway will be your limit with iso 50. There is also Velvia 100.

As mentioned by the others the problem with fluorescent lights is that they look green on film, giving a green cast to your images. There used to be filters to compensate that.

But if your subway switched to daylight tubes, maybe that won't be an issue. I should test that myself, actually.

I don't think Velvia is too saturated. It is subtle by today's (non professional) standards. I like it in sunlight, and it looks great (by professional standard) in even light like overcast or lightbox like illumination.

If you can get good Provia 400x it looks great for Urban photography. A colour reversal tri-x, lot less grain, though.

hi theo
make yourself a tripods you stand on.. basically it is a screw
in your tripod mount hole and a rope under-foot... it will help you steady
your camera below 1/60thS if you haven't mastered being rigid or "the lean"..
have fun with your project, sounds like a blast !
have fun!
john

I'm finding more and more these days, you can't depend on municipally owned spaces to have any one specific lighting. The standard T-12 flos have moved to more "looks like daylight", and read orangey-green on daylight film; same with "daylight" commercial LEDs - everything seems to have more orange pumped into it these days, nice for consumers but weird for photos. then there's sodium vapor, old-school flos, still some tungsten out there...

Your best bet is to scout shooting locations with a digital camera set to daylight or tungsten - I shoot raw images and lay with the tint and temp sliders in camera raw to get a solid sense of what filters are needed (or what gels would make flash match the scene, and then filter the camera to match).