The nice thing about this series: sometimes very unexpected things happen. A friend from Hong Kong sent me a roll of Eastman Double-X 200 black and white film. The regular readers already know I am not a huge fan of black and white film, but they also know I could never resist using a film I haven’t used before, so here we are. This did not end how I expected it to though.
Processing and scanning was done at urbanfilmlab in Germany, the pictures in this article are from one roll of film.
You may be wondering what is going on here. It looks like the film might have not been “ideally” stored and also that Hong Kong’s high humidity lead to some mold on it. Or to quote the lab: no idea where you managed to find that film, but it was in bad condition and hard to scan.
I will still show you what I tried to salvage from these scans, so follow me on this unique journey through Hamburg!
Further Reading
- Analogue Adventures Landing Page
- Review: Nikon AF-S 20mm 1.8G
- Review: Sigma 50mm 1.4 EX
- Review: Nikon 200mm 2.0 Ai IF-ED
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I do not rememeber to have such pictoresque yet interesting artifacts on my Double-x films in the past. IHow/where can I get it? 🙂 It reminds not quite well done bromoil technique in a way.
It is obvious that this was unwanted result but it came out nice in the end I suppose.
Well, I do have one more roll like that 😅
Lucky you! 🙂
Stunning photos!
I personally love the way it came out!
Wow, aren’t you afraid, that the mold will spread inside your camera?
Had I known before, maybe.
The mold spores are already in the air surrounding us everywhere, they need their preferred climate (warm, wet, dark) to grow. It should not make any difference to the camera…
That is misleading, there’s a difference if you bath your equipment in mold spores or if they get just get the “air dose”. I suppose there’s a reason, why nobody will repair a lens with glas mold.
Lenses with mold can be succesfully restored a live happily ever after.
Zeiss does not repair lenses with fungus (I guessed, the other manufactures where the same):
“We ask for your understanding, Zeiss Service generally does not accept Fungus products for inspection, in order to exclude contamination of the service”
But Nikon does, I did not know that:
https://www.nikonimgsupport.com/eu/BV_article?articleNo=000046678&configured=1&lang=en_GB&setRedirect=true
It more depends if the lens is worth is, and if the mold was strong enough to etch into the coating. There are many instructions online how to remove mold, but of course this involves disassembling the lens, so doesn’t make sense for every $20 lens…
And I thought my expired kodak panatomic x from 1981 that I shot a few months ago was moldy wow!
DINER: Waiter, there’s a fly in my soup.
WAITER: Shhh, be quiet or everybody will want one.
FILM PHOTOGRAPHER: Lab, my negatives were all moldy.
LAB: Shhh, be quiet or all the other film photographers will want the latest “vintage artistic effect.”
nice! And you seem to like the Sigma EX as well on film 😉 used that lens a lot on my FM2 (Velvia) and D700 in the past.
A very powerful expressive power!
I love how apocalyptic these images are – you can really feel the fallout! Hamburg Port Authority makes me want to start a band with that name, just so I can use your image for an album cover. I also really love the organic qualities the film adds to the brutalist architecture. Very nice!
I’d like to see a picture of the actual film strip… !
As someone who doesn’t really like “pictorialism” this is the last thing I expected to like. Though, somehow I am in awe with how cool these photos are. It’s like you went back in time to document the height of the Industrial Revolution and used the camera you might find around that time.
Very, ahem, vintage look.
Looks great!