Those of you who know me well know my obsession with Fuji Velvia. But not the recent 100 ISO version–the original 50 ISO is what floats my boat hook, line and sinker. To mix metaphors.

I found out a year or two ago that Fuji wasn’t going to make it anymore. It changed my whole photographic reality and I spent a year wallowing in indecision about what to do. I invested in a mid-grade digital SLR. I tried different film stocks. I cried. Nothing felt right.

I’m on the last few rolls of a box of Velvia 50. They expire in August. I thought I was done for.

But then, one day recently, I was dropping off a few rolls for developing at Citizen’s and made some sort of comment about my lament to the dude, and he re-changed my whole reality again

Apparently, Fuji got so much backlash from folks like me when they announced its discontinuation that they are going to make it again. Albeit slightly differently. And they’re going to call it, maybe, Velvia II.

I looked up Velvia on Wikipedia today for the first time in my life. I should have looked it up years ago. It confirmed a few things I sort of knew but could never exactly “prove,” like:

Velvia has the highest resolving power of any slide film. When shot with an excellent lens, a 35 mm Velvia slide will hold detail equivalent to 22 or more megapixels of image data.

A problem with the original Velvia 50 is that it suffers from the effects of reciprocity law failure much more than other films. Exposing the film for as little as 16 seconds will produce a marked color shift, typically to purple or green, depending on shooting conditions. Anything over four seconds requires the use of blue color correction filters if correct color balance is required, and anything over 32 seconds is “not recommended” by Fuji.

as well as some things I just didn’t know:

he name is a contraction of “Velvet Media”, a reference to its smooth image structure. It is also known as RVP, a classification code meaning “Reversal/Velvia/Professional series”.

I’m still not seeing Velvia II available out there at my favorite online haunts, but I’m waiting waiting waiting. It’s such wonderful news that I won’t have to cure this obsession.

Oh, and you can expect to hear a bit more from the photography side of things in the next while. I’m doing a project, so it’s on my mind.