This should be executed in the darkroom!
- Take your finished roll off your camera
- Make a spiral as shown in the picture
- With a cell phone, light the negative. Take a lot of care; much light can destroy the film.
My idea was to take a roll of film and crumple it up before shooting.
- Find the darkest spot inside your house (I used a walk in closet and shut all the blinds in the room it was connected to) and pulled out all of the film.
- Crumple your film but be careful! The first roll I crumpled up broke, it wasn't nearly as flexible as I thought so I took it a little easier on the second try.
- After bending it around pretty good, roll it back into the cartridge.
- The whole thing works pretty good. Gives a crumpled-up look to some of the photos, putting purple lines across others that were folded more so than crumpled and left color splotches where the film was really bent.
I sort of stumbled on this by accident!
- Spray a ton of WD-40 lubricant all over the inside of your camera. Mine wound up getting all over the film!
Some of the emulsion has these weird marks where the chemicals must have eaten away at the surface, and in others, there are random lines and enhanced softness.
Wilber said, "Expose the film to extreme colds, then instantly expose it to extreme heat. Or something like that. Bathe it in some flaming Sambuca? :-)”
Sambuca is a clear liquor with a good amount of alcohol (3%) and a strong smell of aniseed. In Italy it is often served with 3 coffee beans floating in the drink (Sambuca con la mosca), representing health, wealth and happiness. A flaming Sambuca obviously a shot set on fire.
Before we start, let’s check if we have everything: Sambuca, a shot glass, negative, and a lighter (coffee beans are optical and optional). OK. Now we prepare the drink, put in the negative and set it on fire.
What happens? The alcohol from the Sambuca starts burning. If you extinguish the fire after a few seconds, not much will happen to the negative. If you wait too long the negative starts burning, but just the part which sticks out.
That’s it!
Janisthewanis said, “What about dripping gasoline on your film and lighting it on fire for a second or two, only use a little gas for safety reasons and because its more expensive than your film.”
Another heatseeker experiment!
Preparations:
3 Things needed: gasoline, negative, lighter. Negative is already on hand, lighter too, but where can you get a little amount of gasoline? The petrol station makes no sense as you just need some drops. Still you could try to go there saying “I need gas to burn something”, see if they can help you.
WARNING: Don’t try this experiment at the gas station, there are easier and less dangerous ways to make enemies / go to jail / burn yourself.
I was lucky enough to find one of my colleague’s moped-keys. As I couldn’t find a tube to tap the tank I just used a piece of string attached to the negative and let it go down the tank. Be careful not to drip gas on the vehicle or your body when taking it out. Don’t inhale the fume. Set the negative on fire.
What happens? The gasoline is highly flammable and starts to burn away immediately. In fact it’s not the liquid gas that burns, but the fumes! It doesn’t take long and the gas is gone. Although the negative is distorted from the heat, it was not enough to set the negative itself on fire and the whole fun is over.
Fash_on said, “Scrub the developed film with baking soda toothpaste, random motions, then soak it in mouthwash for a couple of hours? Try different coloured mouthwashes, blue, red, green.”
Rubbing scrubbing soaking fun!
Following ingredients: Baking soda toothpaste (hard to find as the companies try to sell baking soda as "micro-crystals" or other creative paraphrases), I took 2 different brands/types to see if there is any difference. Extra baking soda, just in case. Mouthwash, green (extra mint, yum!).
First try: take a bit of toothpaste and scrub the negative. Not much to see except some pasty stuff, off to the mouthwash.
Second try: bit of toothpaste and some extra baking soda, longer rubbing. This time some thicker pasty stuff and obviously the negative loses some colour, off to the mouthwash.
Third try: the other toothpaste, impatient heavier rubbing. Obvious holes in the emulsion, off to the mouthwash. I let them soak in mouthwash for more than 18 hours before i took them out.
What happens?
The rubbing creates tiny scratches in the negative, and if you go on and on you will finally scratch off the whole negative. The toothpaste doesn’t add much to the scratching (it’s supposed to softly polish your teeth, not to grind them down) but leaves some smudge behind. The extra baking soda isn’t noteworthy either.
And the mouthwash... as your teeth are not green after using it, I’d guess the colouring potential of it is pretty low. And after an 18 hour bath there is no trace of colour effect. At least the negative smells like “waking up in a wild mint field at sunrise”-image painted with neon ballpens.
Summary
These Lab Rat experiments might not have been the most spectacular ones result-wise. But they showed one important thing: You can really try hard to do cruel things to your negatives, they are still OK or at least not completely destroyed (unless you are really enthusiastic about the act of destruction).
Which means: Analog rules! Long live the negatives!
"What you do is you take a roll of till receipt paper and draw swirls on it with a brush and some black ink. Then you take a 120 roll film, unwind it completely, glue the strip of paper onto the beginning and the end of the film and roll the whole thing back. Then shoot.
I use a Seagull for that, as I need at least three stops down for the light to go through the paper. The good thing is that till paper is nearly the right width of 120 film!"
"This was also part of work for my fine art degree and they are re-photographed photographs of me as a child (I scanned the old negative and then re-photographed off the screen with a new film, then put THAT film in bleach). The mix was about 1/4 supermarket bleach and 3/4 water. Left in for an hour. It was then taken out and developed."
Zorgzorg is a Polaroid enthusiast, and now he's dishing out some of his top tips!
Sweet Heat
- Make portrait
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- Burn/heat it under a candle etc.. (you can completely destroy the flatines of the Polaroid)
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- Iron it through paper
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- Remove the black back part of the polaroid.
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- Remove white paste, choose if you remove only paste or negative by scratching softer or harder - due to transparency of it
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- Take color paper or color white one your self
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- Stick it on instead of the previously removed black back.
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- Reproduce it stuck to a window or on a light source.
The Peel Appeal
- Take picture, wait for it to develop
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- Take acetone and wipe across the colour, you want to paint your frame with.
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- Important! While the picture still fresh cut the shape you want and peel it. Time dictates which parts and how much of the negatives and other stuff peel or stay. A shot is still 'fresh' for up to 12 hours after exposure. If it's too old everything will peel off.
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- Leave to it dry.
An easy experiment that will add a little salt to your images but won't leave a bad taste in your mouth!
Tools: a bowl, your developed negative, water, salt, a scanner
- Mix salt + water. Ratio 1:3, 1:5 or even 1:10 for the brave and the bold.
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- Put negative in this mixture
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- Leave to soak for a bit - a few minutes at least.
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- Take it out and let it dry
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- Scan it in - if you scan it in at a good resolution you can see the salt-crystals!
"What I like to do is to take the picture while it is still developing and put it in... the microwave oven! For only 6 seconds, you get burned sides, brown spots and vintage-like colors (at some places). Open, put it in, press 0:06 and Start. Step back, enjoy the sparkles and stay calm; it is normal. If you wait too long before cooking them, the frame will only crack and burn, leaving your developed picture almost perfect. Hit it when it's weak!
It is a superb way to save accidental exposures of your film! I created nice abstract Polas thanks to my microwave. It is really important to NOT leave them over than 6 seconds, else it could simply caught fire! Also beware: it leaves a foul smell when you finish cooking them, phew!"
This psychedelic effect came from a unique concoction.
- Throw some film into a bubbling pot of your preferred soup (or water - if you are dieting) and leave to simmer.
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- Boil your film to suit your taste... If you prefer your pics al dente (i.e with not too much melted, globby colour distortion) then just a minute or two will do! If you boil for too long there won't be much left to see!
Tips: "The outer part of the film is affected more by the temperature, as the heat spreads to the rest of it from here. The longer you boil, the more film will be affected. Boiling for too long will destroy everything on the film.
The soup adds the 'unknown' aspect because it is possible that theingredients can have an affect on the film. Try milk, oil, tomatoes".
This experiment does exactly what it sounds like! The best thing is that unless the whole thing melts you can develop this normally at your favourite lab.
Bake in the oven at 150 degrees or gas mark 3 for 10 minutes
Leave to cool in the oven
Develop as normal
Mandi used Agfa Precisa (cross-processed) and it gave all the shots a slightly baked look, with a purple/blue tint and lots of grain. Other shots became greener rather than the usual orangey/brown.
Film experimentation should never be a chore but this experiment from jallcott makes doing the washing a lot more interesting.
"This basically is the result of putting the film through the washing machine before getting it developed. You end up with a slightly faded 1970s feel to the pictures plus some odd colour splodges and bits of eaten emulsion".
Sometimes the best results are stumbled upon by accident. Check out this experiment from minicooper:
"It was in 2006, we went to London on a weekend and I took my Lubi. If I'm not wrong, I was testing a Fuji Prova 400 asa, x-proc. I went to the lab to have it developed. The following day, I pick-up the roll from the lab and went to my office. I had no film scanner there, so I looked at the negatives, without taking them out from the envelope, putting them below the lamp. As I was very excited and couldn't wait more, with one hand I was standing them up, and with the other had took my digital camera, zoom it, and took a picture of the negative (still inside the envelope). I downloaded the picture to my computer, opened it on Photoshop, crtl-i (invert colors), then shift-crtl-l (autolevels) and...voila! I got the picture! I could see more or less what the result would be when I could scan the negatives at the proper scanner... but I got and amazing textured effect due to the semi-transparent paper from the envelope. It was an analogue texturing effect!"
The Risotto Effect - achieved by adding rice grains to a film, closing it up and leaving it to fester for many months. The whole thing literally came alive! The conditions inside were too wet to develop so this is a scan of the negative. The effects you can see were made by mildew spores branching out and eating away at the emulsion.