Maybe so far I’ve made it sound like going back to film is all good, so I’ll talk about the caveats now. There are some things where digital beats film (and I don’t mean cost and instant feedback etc that I’ve already talked about), and some of these I will miss.

The possibility of changing ISO on the fly is one of the benefits of digital. I will be using Velvia 50 and 100, so whatever I do I have to do it with a slow speed film. I’ll be mostly using the film camera for landscape this summer, so it’s not a critical issue, but should I want to take the occasional macro I’ll run into trouble for sure, because most of my flower work seems to be done in low light. So if I want to do macro with film, I’ll have to find some subjects in brightly lit places. Or shoot petrified flowers.

I was a big fan of Velvia back when. Then around the time I switched to digital, Fuji changed the emulsions and even stopped manufacturing Velvia 50 for a while, but it seems to be back now. The strange thing is that I saw a chart about the grain size and according to Fuji, the ISO 100 emulsions have finer grain than the old 50! I’m gonna have to see it myself, so I will start with a couple of rolls of both.

Another digital benefit I will miss is white balance adjustment. Velvia is daylight balanced so it’ll work fine in sunlight, but when the clouds start coming in, my pictures will get the blues. The solution is obviously to use colour correction filters, but I have to confess that I was never really good with them. I owned an 81B which I never used and now I don’t even have that one. The biggest concession I made to colour correction was to get the Moose polariser which combines an 81A with the pol, so it will work with waterfall photography (which I prefer to do in overcast weather).

With that in mind, I am not completely liberated from post processing when I get the film scans back – one way or another I’ll have to fix the colours because I will not waste any more money on filters.

And the third benefit of digital that I will miss is graduated ND filters. Yes I know there are no grads in digital cameras, but I mean the ease of creating HDRs from multiple exposures. I can do that with film as well, but it quickly becomes a cost issue. Graduated filters is another thing I’ve always overlooked, so there are some type of pictures I never took with film because the latitude wasn’t there. But now I think I will try bracketing in moderation, if the subject is worth it. Or maybe, just maybe, I’ll get an ND grad anyway – I could use it as a ”slow-down tool” with digital as well.

And then finally – there is the issue of waiting. And waiting. And waiting, for the slides to come back from the lab!

Late winter is probably not an ideal time to get new gear, Velvia is wasted on snow and April in particular has never been a productive month for me. But the camera won’t suffer if it has to sit on my shelf for a few weeks and the Velvia rolls won’t grow old in the freezer. When the greens start sprouting up, I’ll be ready!