Negative « Dan Takes Photos

Redscale!

There’s a fairly popular cult movement in film photography known as Redscale. I listen to the Film Photography Podcast religiously, and redscale film was discussed very early on – in episode one, actually – more than a year ago. (See John Milleker’s photo that sparked the discussion.) I originally thought the photos I saw were far too red, and wondered why anyone would want to shoot it. So I put it on my personal “back burner” of photography projects.

So what am I talking about? Basically, color negative film is loaded into the canister backwards – though to be fair, I suppose it could be done with 120 or sheet film too. This means that rather than sensitizing the light-sensitive emulsion directly, light must pass through the orange mask of the acetate base to reach the emuslion. This essentially gives you a severe red/orange filter for free. Theoretically, you could have a 100′ reel of color negative film that you purposefully wind backwards, but I’ve never seen any long spools for sale. Instead, there are a number of internet tutorials on how to redscale your film by transferring the film from one 35mm canister to another.

See the step-by-step tutorials I found here and here. Personally, I followed the steps in the first tutorial. Since I originally heard about the technique, I also learned that Lomography now produces pre-redscaled film for sale. But I didn’t like the idea of paying Lomography prices and not knowing what was going into the rolls.

So why did I finally visit redscale? Because as I saw more and more redscale photos, I saw some shades of green and blue. They were actually colorful! The tutorials above both recommend exposing the film one stop more than you the film’s original rating to compensate for the light lost to the acetate layer. But because negative film has such a mammoth exposure latitude, you can still get plenty of detail when you overexpose. Overexposure on correctly-loaded C-41 film is a common practice for wedding or portrait photographers to smooth skin tones. It’s difficult to do this with slide film and impossible to do with digital. I noticed that most images that I disliked had very rich blacks and fairly dense highlights. So, I thought that maybe a good solution would be to overexpose.

Then, I saw this comparison of exposure settings for redscale film. It is a test of redscaled Fuji Superia 400 rated at 100. Right off the bat, the film is given two stops of exposure compensation rather than the one stop as recommended in the tutorials above. In addition, it seemed like the more muted tonality I was going for is a result of further overexposure by a stop or two. So, I followed the tutorial with some Fuji Superia X-Tra 400 that I picked up at Wal-mart. The original film was rated at ISO 400, and I rated it at ISO 50 – a full three stops of compensation.

I shot two of my three rolls of film at the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear in Washington, DC this past weekend. When I came back, I took the film to CVS for a quick development ($4.35 total, I think it was). When I got my negatives back, though, I noticed that some of the felt must have come off and dirtied the film. So, my scans have a bit of white spots. Still, they look pretty awesome, I think. Note: these are straight scans from the EPSONscan software with just a little bit of color temperature adjustment in Adobe Lightroom.