Our Monday columnist Matjaž has been quite busy lately, so please forgive me if I took the role of the "surrogate columnist" this week. A while ago, our contributor Alessandro kindly reminded me that it would be very nice if we would discuss the reclamation of Fuji FP instant film negatives on the blog. So true, and I am very grateful to him. Fact is also that I only lately began to play with the instant material. Though a bit more expensive and having a more limited color palette, I find instant film very pleasing with its own aesthethics. Instant film also fits perfectly into our rushy lifestyles-you can shot and get quickly a few photos having all their analog beauty and then set your camera into standby mode till next time. Yet you can still get a negative from your shots. The specific aesthetics of these negatives comes also from the fact that the negative is actually a superposition of a color and a BW negative, therefore the colors get quite muted. Fortunately, there are many many useful tutorials how to obtain a usable negative from Fuji FP film by just using common household bleach, that seemed to me pointless and unfair to make yet another tutorial about this very topic. It would be really just reinventing the wheel. But it's nice to remind about this hidden potential of instant film once in a while. Below, I included a video tutorial made by Sebek (YouTube user baldipl) which seems to me simple and concise to comprehend. And I thank him for his contribution to our community.
Sharing the information, photos or videos among the web is another issue and it just happens too often people just forget to give the proper credits when posting something on their own sites. It's not only unethical-we all know that-it doesn't pay you back such a misbehavoir. You can only lose on your own credibility, that's it. And makes someone else (the proper author) angry. Be nice and fair to others and others will be nice and fair to you.
Coming back to reclaimed negatives-I thought it would be a good point anyway to show how important is to NOT allow the bleach to come in contact with the emulsion side-it will bleach your image too, and you'll get a "nice" magenta cast in the negative (green in the positive image). Below is my very first bleached negative and the inverted image (without corrections).
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| Reclaimed negative shot on the light table. Bleach leaked underneath on the emulsion edge and also spilled near the truck's front end. The result are green stains (magenta in the negative). |
Last but not least, I must confess-the negative on the light table has been shot using my small and handy Philips HD camera. Yes, I have some "digital sins", I confess :) I bought it because is water and shockproof, portable like a cell phone and makes videos of acceptable quality, for example instructional videos. The photo quality leaves much to be desired, but for descriptional purposes only is good enough. I think it will be a good tool helping me with the blog. And paid it only about 110 €. I just try to be conservative with the digital gear. If I'd be a bit more conservative with the analog gear, probably it wouldn't hurt, too. But that's another story.
Mitja
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