Slide film for photographing paintings

I need some advice on shooting slides of artwork (paintings). My plan is to use hot lights

(3200k ECT bulbs), an 80A filter and daylight slide film. I am open to suggestion however.

What would be a good film? My first thought was provia for its fairly neutral color pallete,

but I have heard that velvia is popular for artwork because it can cause the colors to 'pop',

I haven't seen the paintings yet and am not sure if that would be a desired affect.

Or perhaps I should forget the filter and use a tungsten balanced film, (is that EPP or EPT

these days?).

I used to shoot a bunch of painter portfolios. using 64T is fine. make sure you bracket. playing around with all the mess (provia with filters etc) just gives you an excuse to try something different that could ultimately fail.

I usually use the Fuji 64T stock (I think its called type II) because I found it generally cooler that the kodak 64T.

EPY. Or the Fuji equivalent.

Forget the filter. If your lights are 3200k, why waste light? I shoot slides of artwork all the time with EPY, and get excellent results. Both for my own work and slide for other folks.

EPY has excellent reciprocity characteristics, and will handle long exposures without losing much speed - unlike a lot of daylight films, some of which kinda fall apart at longer exposure times. EPY holds it's color and speed. You might end up with unnecessarily long times and color shifts and a lot of screwing around to get acceptable results with a daylight film.

If you want to make colors pop, and it is a critical shoot, test first if you really must try something like Velvia. I would almost recommend shooting a tungsten film, and scanning and photoshopping to bump up a color saturation, if the artist seeks that rendition, rather than being locked into a Velvia rendition and possible technical hassels. You could use digital manipulation and digital output to transparency film to get a flexible process, if your client wants good output and is willing to pay for results.

If you are going with a daylight balanced film and an 80A filter, Fuji Astia 100F and Kodak

EPN have a far more neutral palette than Provia 100F.

As Berton and Charlie point out, using a 3200K balanced film like Kodak 64T or Fuji 64T(II)

are better films and won't rquire the conversion filter.

Thanks for the input guys! The reciprocity factor hadn't occurred to me. I believe that

provia isn't that great in this respect and I will probably be shooting in the 1s range.

I checked into the the fuji 64 tungsten (RTP) and Fuji's data sheet states that this is

balanced to 3100k (not 3200k) and they say there is an additional color filtration

recommended on the individual packaging. Is anyone familiar with this and is it an

important factor? I don't have access to a wide range of CC filters and am pretty much

limited to an 80A and daylight film or the tungsten film without filters, partly because of

time constraint and local availability of films.

In my opinion, Fujichrome 64T (RTPII) is "THE FILM" to be used when tungsten lighting is required. It is balanced at 3100 Kelvin degrees according to Fuji's specifications, but it works great with 3200 Kelvin degrees lamps, no filters are required, it produces very faithful colors, contrast, and is very fine grained. I highly recommend this film, nothing in the "tungsten film segment" available right now comes close to the high quality of this great film.

It will produce much better results than any "filtered" daylight balanced film with tungsten lamps.

Fujichrome Provia 100 is not a "neutral palette" type of film.