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Yesterday I got my first ever Velvia slides back from the processor. I was really keen to see the result, which I was expecting to be spectacularly colourful. But all 37 photos appear to be underexposed. The film was Velvia 50 iso, and I had the camera set to 50 iso. The equipment used was a Canon EOS500 and three different Canon zooms. I used apperture priority to have control of the depth of field and relied on the camera's own metering to choose the shutter speed. The only variation on that was to use the camera's spot metering on a few frames. I definitely didn't have the camera's exposure compensation adjusted by mistake (I've done that before!!).
The only explanations I can think of are...
1. Velvia is supposed to act like this. I find this a bit unlikely, but I'm hoping any experienced Velvia users can guide me about any standard adjustments they make, such as over-exposing every frame by a stop or whatever.
2. The camera's metering has become inaccurate. I think that's also unlikely, but perhaps all the prints I've been taking for a while have been altered by the labs to cover this up. I haven't taken any slide film for over two years and that was Kodachrome which turned out well-exposed.
3. The lab might have processed the film incorrectly, thinking it was a different speed or something. I have no processing knowledge and wouldn't know if that's even possible.
4. I shouldn't have picked up my slides on Friday the 13th!
So, any words of wisdom from the experienced guys out there before I waste another roll?
I'll try to attach (if this works!) a general example of a scan of one of the slides, as well as an almost identical photo I took a couple of minutes later with my Kodak point-and-shoot digital camera. Neither photo has been altered in any way in any imageing software, apart from resizing.
I used a polarizor on all of the Velvia shots (not used on the point-and-shoot digital example of course), but the polarizor has never had this effect on my pictures before, and as far as I'm aware the camera's metering should automatically compensate for the light lost through any filters.
Thanks,
Carl
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