vendredi 28 janvier 2005

Red Faced... But no blue language When we lived in west Wales and before my wife's MS had taken it's unkind grip on her movements, we often used to play a round of putting after dinner. Usually we jumped into our Mini and sped off towards the coast. The putting green was in Aberdovey about 12 miles away and the trip never took more than twenty minutes... sometimes only fifteen. This doesn't appear a fast average... but the first mile was single track road, three stretches were through town or village and the remaining nine were full of bends, dips, drops down a hillside or into the sea. The Cambrian Coast road was, in a way, our Welsh equivalent of the Corniche between St. Raphaël and Cannes... or maybe I've been drinking too much St.Raphaël! Our Mini wasn't a "Hot Car"... but when you knew the road well and judged your approaching speed and distance correctly as one of the few overtaking places loomed into view you could pass anything and arrive in one piece without touching the brakes for the whole trip... I was a gearbox thrasher and loved every sound it made. And the habit of not touching the brakes into near-impossible bends so as to fool the fast following joker that the bend was faster that it looked - because the tell-tale brake lights didn't blink - was a ploy I shouldn't have played. Of course Graham Hill's words used to jog in my memory... he was the only driver to win the World Driving Championship, Indianapolis 500 and Le Mans. After his 1972 Le Mans win in a Matra-Simca he argued that whilst other drivers used to change down through the gears on the Mulsanne Straight to slow from 200mph for the sharp right-hand Mulsanne Corner he simply used to brake... because brake pads were quicker to replace than a gearbox during a 24-hour endurance race! I cringe at the thought of it now... but I think it was a part of the frustrations of our lives which were being tested to the limit by the incurable malady affecting Trish. After a round of putting by the seaside, and maybe a bag of chips on the promenade afterwards, we'd head back home at a gentle pace enjoying the changing colours from the setting sun cast onto the wide and winding Dyfi Estuary. At one point there was a panoramic view towards the Irish Sea which usually caught the reflections of sky and clouds in the intertwining channels of tidal water which raced in and out at quite a speed (ha, that's what influenced me!) along this part of the coast. The main image is typical of the view we would stop to enjoy for a while... and I would usually take a few shots with whatever camera and lens I'd tossed onto the back seat before we raced off. This time it was a Pentax 67 loaded with Fuji transparency film and a medium telephoto 165mm lens on the front. So what happened next? Question : How do you usually process colour transparency films? Answer : It's obvious isn't it... First Developer, Colour Developer then Bleach-Fix with several washes of water in between. It's a simple matter of following the instructions to the letter... every photographer does it that way. And so did I until that night when, with tiredness approaching fast and over familiarity with the simple three-bath Chrome-6 process making me lax, the colour developer was poured into the developing tank first. It took me only one second to realise my mistake... but it also took only one second for the roll of Fuji Velvia to be ruined as well. Or was it? Although having probably ruined what I thought were potentially good shots by the Dyfi of those elements earth, air, fire and water I wasn't going to give up on everything immediately. In an instant I dumped the colour developer into its storage container and poured the pre-heated rinse water into the tank, giving several changes and vigourous agitation to try to halt further chemical reaction... and damage. I collected my thoughts and read the Photocolour Chrome-6 instruction sheet for help. And there it was in black and white... "Even very slight contamination can cause serious loss of density in the shadows and... falsification of colour." (sic) I was sick, but decided to restart and run the process to completion. Eventually, the processing cycle over, some images did just appear out of the strangely mixed pink hues... but it was more luck than anything else. Out of ten possible shots from the 120 film a few very small areas looked vaguely recognisable. Clipping these out with sharp scissors and mounting them into 35mm slide mounts saved the day in a way and produced some strange coloured shots which have actually sold to a couple of photographic magazines. Although this experiment, if you can call it that, isn't repeatable with any degree of accuracy you could try the technique if you have some nearly exhausted or out of date chemicals left over in the darkroom... and a film or two on which the subject matter is repeatable or exposures are hopelessly wrong. Whilst it's not exactly "cross-processing" (processing colour transparency film as a negative and vice versa) it may make you rather cross processing it! As a clue to what may happen the following "warnings" worth disobeying, perhaps, have been taken from the Photocolour information sheet... First Developer contaminated with Colour Developer - even very slight contamination can cause serious loss of density in the shadows and unexposed areas of film and falsification of colour... in my case Pinky-Red. First Developer contaminated with Bleach-Fix - 0.5% contamination causes loss of upper densities and the general appearance of 2-stops of over-exposure. A 2% contamination gives serious loss of image density with a cyan / green cast and low density green edges. Colour Developer contaminated with First Developer - Strong green or yellow / green cast. Colour Developer contaminated with Bleach-Fix - Severe cyan cast. 7:05:08 PM    comment []