Bizarre cross procesing technique: film accelleration

Cross processing is developing film in the "wrong" chemistry, for example shooting slide (E6) film and processing it in the chemicals meant for colour negative (C-41) film. This is normally what’s meant when people say cross processing, but it can go in almost any direction. You can also do C-41 film in E6 chemistry, or any film in B&W chemistry. The only thing you can’t do is B&W film in colour chemistry, because the bleach leaves you with a blank roll.

Apparently "film acceleration" is a bit more complicated, and sounds a lot like something called the "Henry Beck process" that the owner of my local lab told me about (and I can find absolutely no information on anywhere). Instead of a simple chem switch, this is: underexpose slide film, pre-soak, soup in B&W developer, wash, fix, wash, bleach, C-41. Yeow! But the results do look unique.

Read the how-to, with sample images, at JPG Magazine.

Flickr member pochedunfou also has a large set of accelerated photos, which serves as an excellent reference of the effect across a number of different emulsions of varying age.

Update: pochedunfou pointed me to the Be Great: Accelerate group for the technique on Flickr. Cool!

Experiment: pinhole camera toss

Pinhole camera toss (atomic)

I think the camera toss phenomenon, started by Ryan Gallagher (also see his Flickr stream), is really cool. The idea is that you set your camera for a relatively long exposure in a dark place with a nifty arrangement of lights, and throw the camera in the air while the shutter is open. The results can be jaw-dropping.

I decided to give it a go while I was out shooting pinholes the other day. At f/235, I figured I’d better do it outdoors in bright sun to have any chance of getting anything on film. As it turns out, the sun was the only thing that actually turned up. This is on Fuji Astia 100F cross-processed in C-41, shot at about ISO 25, with multiple tosses in the air per exposure.

I may use this one for holiday cards this year (if I send any), as I think it looks a bit like a wrapped present:

Pinhole camera toss (gift)

Also check out the first known pinhole toss photos ever, by Alan Cooper aka alspix, using his famous matchbox pinhole camera: photo 1, photo 2.

See also: Ryan Gallagher’s blog post about these and alspix’ photos, Tarja Trygg’s pinhole solargraphy project (which I thought I posted about before but apparently didn’t… check it out, it’s really, really cool)