Photographing Morro Rock with Fuji Velvia

I’m not sure how often I will be writing blog posts about my photography adventures but I thought I’d write this one up and maybe more will come. My girlfriend and I drove up to Morro Beach on December 3rd and stayed for 2 nights camping at Morro Strand State Beach. I decided to bring one camera along with me, the Fuji GW690III. This is the newest camera to my collection and I was pretty excited to try it out as a landscape camera. I bought it primarily for its format, 6x9, and it looks fantastic on a light table.

The next decision was what film to use. I honestly already knew what film I was going to use before even getting in the car to drive up. I wanted to shoot Fuji Velvia 50. I’ve seen many pictures taken with that film and loved how vivid the colors can be and hoped to get some nice colors in my pictures. This wasn’t the first time I was shooting Velvia though. I tried a few rolls while in the Huntington Botanical Gardens with the Fuji camera and all the pictures were pretty much garbage. The problem of course was me, many of compositions I shot had too wide a dynamic range of light for the film to handle. It was a very expensive lesson I learned!

I rely on a Sekonic L-758 light meter to do all my manual metering. It has a great spot meter that I use for all my film photography when doing landscape. I generally meter for the brightest and darkest areas of the composition then use the average to get the exposure settings. I knew the limitations of Velvia, so that limited what time I can photograph which was pretty much around dawn.

I was quite happy with the developed photographs. A few were too dark but many turned out great. There are a few things I need to address. The L-bracket I use on my digital camera is too small for the Fuji camera and it forced me to use the tripods little groove to get the camera into portrait mode and I was never able to get the camera leveled correctly which I find annoying. I’m the person who likes to get as much correct before taking the picture than fixing issues after the picture has been taken. Essentially, I like to spend as little time in processing the picture as possible.

With the GW690 I only get 8 shots per roll. This is great when you are only shooting one subject, it allows you to concentrate on 3-4 compositions then take a few different exposures of those composition. Let’s be honest here, shooting film nowadays is expensive. I have all my film developed and scanned by The Darkroom and have been very happy with the results. I’ve also used a place in Los Angeles called Photo Impact Imaging and their results were great but a little more pricier.