Originally in my project idea, I wanted to work with film so that I could damage the film then experiment with enlarging the images, to see the difference between film damage and print damage. I knew the potential issues with shooting on colour film and enlarging to black to and white paper, but I was interested to see what results I would get.
I began with cutting a small sheet of photo paper into strips to do test strips of the timings. I did each exposure at 2 seconds so the timing accumulated along the strip:
However, the results I got were barely visible. I had anticipated very low contrast due to the colour film, but not that low. So I turned up the contrast on the enlarger and tried again:
However, this just made the whites exceedingly white and the dark areas the exact opposite. it also made the grain of the shot really high. So I went back again and tried the lowest contrast:
Once again the image was just completely flat. So I tried the test strip at 4 seconds per exposure.
This was better, but still not brilliant. I decided to do the whole test strip at 10 seconds, since that was the best of a bad bunch.
This came out pretty much identical to all the others and I was about ready to give up when I realised the contrast was still down, so I turned it up again and did it again.
However, that did pretty much nothing different to the original test strip. So I picked 10 seconds for the exposure and tried enlarging the whole image to see if I just couldn’t see the contrast areas properly:
Still awful. This made me panic slightly as I now had no idea what to do. I moved forward with the attempts at ruining the film with alcohol, but it did absolutely nothing. There was a smudged area in the bottom left of the image, but I think that was already on the film and not due to the alcohol. So this left me with a choice; 1) I could carry on with the images and just accept the low quality and change my idea for damaging Tom’s film, or 2) I could get the images I liked printed at snappy snaps in colour and damage them instead.
Option 2.
Amy Elizabeth Photography 