Using the Fantastic new Fuji Reversia
Whilst struggling to re-design my website using the appalling Microsoft FrontPage 2002 software, I made a chance discovery. Given the slightest excuse, FrontPage would display my photos in the photo galleries I was trying to create in negative. I thought a lot of them looked pretty cool in reverse!
I love the idea of playing with absurd photographic techniques, like taking pictures of a flower using 4 ASA instant slide film which only has two colours, white and blue. I'd encourage anyone who's interested to check out Mark Meyer's fascinating article about the various bizarre Polaroid instant slide films - here.
It's always been one of my favourite features of a digital darkroom that you can muck about with images without having to commit yourself to a whole evening's work with smelly chemicals. You would have thought that the freedom which comes with Photoshop and ever more accessible digital technology would lead to more exciting and interesting images... However most of the unusual images I see which I like have been created using an established "weird" photographic technique such as infra-red film or cross-processing (developing slide film in chemistry designed for colour negative film).
I've never been bothered to load up with infra-red never mind PolaBlue which surely must win the award for weirdest film ever. I hadn't heard of it before, in fact I wouldn't be surprised if Mark Meyer has made up the whole thing and actually took his blue flower photo on Sensia then tinkered with it in Photoshop!
Which gets me to my point, which is that Photoshop and digital imaging is not the devil's spawn which some purists make it out to be. Actually it can be quite a laugh. True, it makes it even easier for those with disturbing taste disorders to produce dross in ever larger quantities, but on the flip side you can try out an experiment in a few minutes which would have taken so long to do photographically that you would never even have bothered.
You may have guessed by now, even if you haven't yet checked out their colour positive counterparts in the main image galleries, that all these pictures were taken on normal slide film, developed normally, and twiddled with using Photoshop.
Like your eyes acclimatising to the dark, you seem to get drawn into the fabulous reverse-world after a while, and when you convert the images back to their positive form they look positively boring (no pun intended!)
