The first roll of slide film I ever shot was Ektachrome 200G, gifted to me by the friend who introduced me to the concept of cross-processing. I’d never heard of it– you develop slide film that should yield positives in the chemicals for negatives, and the resulting prints can range from super-saturated to super-skewed. That first roll blew my mind. The pictures were wildly colorful, a sharply contrasted chromatic feast. Life felt extreme and colorful back then anyway, and my photographs matched the intensity of life at 21.
My Ektachrome life.
The first time I was disappointed by slide film was a roll of Velvia 100. The color skewed so far yellow that the result was a sort of sickly monochrome, mostly devoid of the details or colors that caught my eye in the first place. While some images were amazingly cool– seriously, I don’t think it’s possible to make The Guggenheim look bad– most were extremely disappointing. I had a whole pile of Velvia 100, but I put it to the side. I’ve been carrying it around for years.
The pond wasn’t really yellow.
Recently, however, I started considering the film again in a different way.
You see, Velvia is actually a very popular film, well-loved by film photographers. I was so far down the cross-processing rabbit hole that at first, I couldn’t figure out why they enthused over it… but of course, all these people were shooting SLIDES, not negatives.
I don’t have a slide projector (does anybody these days?) and I love having and holding prints, so I never considered developing the Velvia as positives. But all my film ends up scanned and on a computer anyway. Why not try slides?
Thus for the first time in years, I shot a roll of Velvia 100.
The results? COMPLETELY THRILLING.
The roll skews towards blue, probably exaggerated by the fact that the film expired years ago. But that blue lends a nostalgic cast to the images, and the quality of the light is just DIFFERENT. I wish it was possible to show you what these slides look like against light; they are even sharper than the images here.
While cross-processed images are saturated and contrast-y and sometimes blown-out, these pictures go the opposite way. Some are slightly underexposed, but the details are sharp, and I think the faded quality of a few of the images adds a special feeling. These pictures are like old memories, created new.
This experiment has inspired me to (someday, somewhere, somehow) get a good negative/slide scanner, because I’m very dependent on my lab’s scans. And it’s also encouraged me to continue experimenting shooting positives. It’s a whole new world of photography to explore!
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