Expired?

Week 34 – Mystery Roll? – Exchange Select Color Print Film 800

"Hey dude, I picked up this camera at the thrift shop and it still has film in it. Wanna shoot it and see what happens?"

Stories that start this way, end either really well or really poorly. I'll let you know how it ends when it happens. This is not quite that story. 

A friend of mine, Nik, from  Super Awesome Laser Media is an avid thrift shop shopper. At least once a week I get an update as to where all the fun photographic toys are. He tagged me in a Facebook post the other day saying that he had come across an old Minolta 35mm camera with a pretty decent lens. He said that I needed to shoot the rest of the film, develop it, and see what happens. I was super excited to see what would come.

When the day came to deliver the camera, he was unable to bring it...but did have a surprise for me none the less. Another roll that was in a random camera.

"Usually if the battery is good enough to rewind it I will pop out what is inside" he told me. Followed up by  "this one took a while, so there is bound to be something on it". And there was. A grainy mess taken sometime within the last 10 years or so based on the uniform of the service member. Below is what was on that roll. 

Week 26 – I Hope These Turn Out – Fuji Superia X-Tra 400 (+1 Stop) (Exhausted C41 Chemicals?)

Pixie from last week also introduced me to Clockwork Calamity (Zivity profile, still just as NSFW as last week). And we had a great shoot (albeit very bright and sun-hurty) where she was cosplaying as Black Canary (Set totally should be live on Zivity if you wanted to throw me a few votes ;) ). 

Seeing as how I have been having a hard time getting models to work with, I wanted to make sure I snatched up the opportunity to get some more people into the blog. The sad, and very unfortunate thing is I really should have taken my own thoughts to heart in "week 24" and bought new C41 chemicals. The negatives turned out SUPER thin (or at least look that way before scanning them). I'm not sure if I will get anything that remotely looks like the correct colors out of this roll.

As I'm prepping this blog post I am about to purchase more, so hopefully my Dragoncon photos (Spoiler Alert...they start NEXT WEEK!) will be processed much better. Also we are up to 41 rolls as of this update! 

(Ninja Edit: Yep. It was totally the chemicals. The DragonCon Color photos turned out great!)

Ninja edit: Excuse my language, but HOLY SHIT. I bashed on Photoshop for the longest time and seriously saw it as a crutch and not a tool. But after seeing what I was able to recover from these images I am seriously impressed. I bet someone much more skilled than I could have even done a better job. I mean, look at what came out of my scanner from these:

I guarantee you they look worse in "person". I'm willing to accept the loss in sharpness that I had to take in order to get rid of the scanning artifacts in order to rescue even a few of these images. Especially considering I was trying for a result more like this (taken on my digital camera):

Development Notes:
Unicolor C41 Kit - Probably exhausted

Week 10 – Nicky – Fujicolor Super HQ 100 (Expired?)

Its just my luck that I find a film stock completely by accident that I really like, only to find that its been discontinued. I purchased a few rolls of this Super HQ in a film lot on ebay. I THINK I have found more of it on Amazon, and am debating on if I want to pull the trigger or not. But I really do like the colors it captured. 

I am super happy with how this roll turned out. After a few failed experiments with color I was glad that this one came out the way it did.

Shout out to Nicky from Nicky's Eye View for being my model this week. She not only does a great "Blue steel" but she is a great photographer herself. Follow her on Instagram or Tumblr

I still need to work on my scanning environment. Way too much dust and cat hair is floating around in my apartment. 

Development Notes:
Standard Development
Unicolor C-41 Kit

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