I have a bit more time on my hands at the moment so I have been playing 🙂

Firstly, I have swapped a few films with friends where I have exposed them first, they will then expose them again. I have sent out some 35mm redscale to be exposed on the ‘normal’ side (also known as EBS for expose both sides), some 120 films to be double exposed, and an APS where I returned the symbol to 1 after shooting. Secondly, I took out one of my older digital cameras.

I got a link back from thegladsatsuma_onfilm who received one of the films I sent out. I say sent out, but I gave her the film on a day trip to Blackpool that we took together with another friend. She completed the film while we wandered around and then near her home later that day. I had prepared a Kodak Ultramax for redscale shooting at 100asa and then filled it with flowers and patterns. I marked the first frame location on the film so she could try to match the shots. I then flipped the film back the right way and she shot it at 400asa.

📷 My camera: Canon AE1
📷 Clare’s camera: Voigtlander Vito BL.
🎞️ Kodak Ultramax
Dev&scan:  Photo Hippo

Here are most of the results.

Clare likes them a lot, I like them…but not quite as much. I think the normal side needs to be more prominent or the red side to be less so, take your pick. If you look at Clare’s Instagram feed she is more experimental than I am and is very good at it. My photos tend to look as intended, with fewer double exposures. Recently I have tried to lean a bit more towards the experimental side, hence this post. I think it is her influence.

I tried another experiment on the same day Clare completed her side of the film above. A while ago I received two random 120 films in a job lot film purchase from the bay. I hadn’t heard of the films and had to research what to do with them. The research suggested that they were slide films that would suit cross processing. As Clare was helping me with the film above, I gave one of the films to her. I kept one for myself and used it in Blackpool. The film was Lomography X-Pro 200. The film was discontinued in 2018 so this one was expired.

One of the reviews of the film I read suggested using a blue filter to tame the yellow tint. For that reason, I decided to use my Holga CFN which had a blue flash option. As you can see in the blue photo below, that didn’t work out at all. That was a double exposure which meant the flash fired twice, but it is still well underexposed. There were a couple of other shots of my friends taken in the same manner, but they looked so awful I promised not to post them 🙂 The post linked also suggested putting a UV filter on the lens to help with sharpness, I did do that and I think it helped.

There are two shots of a hydrangea plant, on that outside shot, you can see it has worked. One of the shots is with the blue flash and one without, that one is yellow. So as long as the flash is within a meter of the subject a blue flash does cancel the yellow. But what about the other shots, the outside ones, there is no yellow tint. The results are a bit of a hit or miss with colours. Clare likes them 🙂

Again these were developed by Photo Hippo and even though it is 120 cross-processed, the download link came back a couple of days from posting. Super job.

My final set of photos is from a walk in Knaresborough. We are going through another heatwave, hopefully, it doesn’t get to 40+ degrees this time. The clear, bright weather was perfect to use the infrared-converted digital camera again.

Of the three sets of experimental photos, these last ones are my favourite. If and when I get the other results back I will post them on the blog.

Do you have any more ideas for experimenting that might take me out of my comfort zone?