Oh boy, are my emotions are all over the place with the long-awaited development of my redscaled film. On one hand, I’m happy to have learned about an easy-to-do alternative method and am eager to try it again. On the other hand, I’m sad that out of 21 frames, I only ended up with 6 photos.
On another hand, the evil chicken and that old truck are totally rockin’. But, on the other hand, I figured out a lot of this roll was from my trip to the Rogue Hop Farm in Independence, OR — thus I was sad again, and also a little weirded out by how many hands I apparently have.
The photos are a little shoddy because they were so underexposed that I had to stretch the boundaries of my scanner in order to get a decent image. And the last one, well I think it’s pretty obvious that I just gave up completely. :)
So, what’d I learn from this experience? Never load film magazines in a hurry, and if you make a conscious decision to redscale your film: overexpose, overexpose, over-ex-pose!
If you’d like to learn more about this technique, there’s a great Flickr group simply called Redscale.
Happy Friday, everyone!
Mirka
on December 2, 2011 3:45 pmI think the first one looks great! And it's great you didn't give up, so I'm looking forward to your next red-scaled batch!
I will have to try this some time as well. So far I only read the how-to and haven't had the heart to trash one whole film yet ;)
Kim
on December 2, 2011 3:51 pmThanks Mirka! There is pre-redscaled 35mm film you can buy from the Lomography store. I've been slowly going through a roll... Excited to be experimenting at a much cheaper price. :]
Jonathan Fleming
on December 3, 2011 10:41 amI think a really cool effect came from the underexposure, especially in the shot of the truck. Such an ethereal mood. Very cool!
sam jo
on December 3, 2011 6:55 pmoh kim, i LOVE these! i can't pretend to know much about photography, but in architecture we are always trying to create images and renderings that evoke a certain mood or tone, and i am ALL ABOUT THESE. i don't even know what redscale means, but you can bet i am clicking on that link!
Kim
on December 3, 2011 9:16 pmAw shucks, thanks a bunch, Sam!
Basically, film has two sides and when you redscale it, you are loading it into your camera backwards, so that the "wrong side" of the emulsion is exposed which gives the red and orange tones. You can buy some pretty cheap packs of 35mm film that's already been loaded backwards from the Lomography store, if you ever want to give it a shot!
Trude
on December 9, 2011 9:51 amSuch a crazy effect! Almost apocalyptic - but I think that's because we've actually seen crazy yellow-red skies around here in SoCal with the fires in recent years. That first frame should totally go up on the wall somewhere.