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Red Scale

Here's a new (old) technique: Red Scale. You basically shoot through the backside of the film. This was discovered by accident by large-format photographers that use sheet film. Occasionally one would load a film sheet backwards into the holder. People have been doing this for years, but it has seen a recent resurgence. Most people roll their own at home by re-rolling fresh film backwards into a donor canister. I bought mine already rolled (Rollei Redbird 400) to just try out before making that dive. I love it! It's awfully grainy and hard to expose properly, but the results are wild.

Here's how it works: film has three layers of sensitivity, with the blue on top, green next, and red on the bottom. Since light is made up of different colors and wavelengths, those with the shortest wavelength, blue, only make it to the top layer. The medium wavelength green ones pass through the top layer and stop at the middle layer. Finally, the red, long wavelengths of light pass through the top 2 layers and hit the bottom layer. Reversing the film basically only lets the red through, because blue and green light can't penetrate it. I found that while working with red scale film in Photoshop, you can pretty much eliminate the blue and green in your images and not affect it (this does not apply to channels, only color hue and saturation controls). It has a benefit of removing blue and green scan artifacts (and there were many with most of these).

If you're going to try the Rollei 400, I suggest you rate it at 100 ISO instead of the box speed of 400. Their instructions (and some discussions on the net) say leave it at 400, but a lot of mine were unusable at that speed. I also found that the shorter the shutter speed (1/125th and above), the more yellow the shots were. The slower (1/60 and below) were more red.

All these were shot with a Canon A-1, most with a splendid 17mm lens.