One and a Half Rolls of Polyfilm 35mm Experimental Film from Ukraine
I got a new package from Ihor, and this one contained a couple of rolls of 35mm film, amazingly.
I put the first roll through my Nikon S rangefinder. When I opened it up after rewinding, I found this disaster.
Oops. Yeah, that didn’t work.
As an experiment, I put the second roll in my Nikon FE and shot half of it. Then I took it into a darkroom and, illuminated with red light, I cut the film where I had stopped shooting and saved the rest for another day. I could see that some of the emulsion was loosened, but most of it was okay.
Rather than rewind it back into the canister, I manually pulled the film out of the back of the camera and immediately transferred it to a developing tank. The emulsion was bubbling off of the last few frames, but most looked okay.
The first frame suffered from being next to a previous frame where the shutter stayed open way too long and there was some spillover. And the picture is underdeveloped; I used Rodinal 1:50 for 12 minutes, and that clearly wasn't long enough. But there is a picture here.
Picture two has a bit of haze from light piping from frame 0, and has some large artifacts, but looks reasonably good. There is a texture with a ton of white pinholes that recurs throughout the roll. I actually kind of like the effect even though it’s a fault.
Picture three has another light leak, but is otherwise not bad.
Photograph four has scratches and some large artifacts, and suffers from the underdevelopment, but is otherwise okay, showing the speckled texture of the pinholes.
Photo five has another light leak and a few artifacts, but continues the theme of lots of pinholes and being underdeveloped.
Photo six is kind of a mess just because it’s hard to see any details on the boat. But more of the same, scratches, a few big artifacts, lots of pinholes.
The remaining photos are where things kind of go off the rails, where the lifted emulsion adhered to other negatives. It’s an interesting effect, not one I would seek, but kind of different.
Number nine is the last photo, and is interesting because it’s basically all lifted emulsion. The underlying image is not really present.
I’m not sure what I’m going to do with the remainder of this roll. Maybe I'll examine it under red light before trying to shoot it. Maybe I’ll make a pinhole camera that I don't have to worry about rewinding. I’ll come up with something to do with it.
Posted at 12:19 AM