Sometimes accidents can propel you in a whole new direction, one that you did not intend, however it good to also follow through on a process and see what happens. I accidentally messed up the development of my own images during the Plant based developer workshop with Eileen White from Sustainable Darkroom.
I was also unable to use my local lab’s scanner as this would have jammed it as I had cranked the hols of the side of the film when I was winding the film on the developing wheel during the workshop. This meant that the film ended being stuck together and and some area became undefined and under developed. Undeterred I decided to see what I could do with he fit, I also didn’t want to waste the film and consign it to the bin, wondering what if?
So, my local lab at Photofusion suggested that I rent their highly powerful and accurate Imacon scanner, which I did and it was good to use it, was not difficult and I was also to obtain 20 images from a roll of 35 images, not bad!
On inspection at home I decided that it wasn’t worth trying to make the images look accurate and refined, the images were too blurred and I actually liked the fading and distortion that I had created, I added a filter to them - sepia tone which made them look like historical images from 19th century - well not exactly but close enough!
I them printed them off onto reclaimed paper from Photofusion (thank you!) and now I am wondering what to do with them next, I feel I need to keep on with the process and see art can be done, whether that be collages or annotations, writing of some sort. I’ll just play around and see what happens.
Tomorrow I am off for a walk in Chilworth with two friends, both photographers and we ware going to explore the landscape of Surrey! This will be a nice opportunity for me to go for a walk with other women of colour and to also explore a place that is unfamiliar. My aim is to try and capture some portraits of them and of myself, to see what community feels like in this situation and to try and enact some thoughts that have been percolating in my mind of late.
I will them be developing the film and scanning at home myself - I have just bought a flatbed scanner so I am looking to get more agency and autonomy over my working methods, and to save money as well and in the long run it will be better for me.
Images below are scans and prints of the 35mm roll of film from workshop.
I scanned the film using Imacon scanner which I hired from PhotoFusion for a few hours, the process was simple and I concentrated on scanning the images that had a tangible image on it.
It was hard to decipher the septic frames so some images ended up needing onto each other unintentionally or the tress were braced but he fact they were not processed correctly.
First scan and first impression, each frame was different and I had to manage my expectations, although I am intrigued by the process and what could come next, the potential in the image is what is intriguing me.
Managed to recover some space paper from PhotoFusion that would not go through the printer. the paper is high quality and mixture of fine art, semi gloss and gloss paper. I have cut the paper up to A4 size s that I can feed it through my inject printer at home.
This also means I can be sustainable in my process, experiment and know that nothing is going to waste and that I have freedom to be playful.
I printed off some of the images, a mixture of contrasts and black and white and the sepia Toine which I changed in Adobe Lightroom, they have a haunting quality and now look more like historical photographs, which is great! I wonder how they will look at collages? Or perhaps the backdrop for a portraits?