Following on from my previous post about mottled HP5, here’s another example of the fault. The question is, can I use it to my advantage?
The pictures are from the very last roll of the defective film I had and, believe it or not, are from 6x9 negative scans. They’re possibly the roughest MF shots you’ve seen for a long time. However, I was looking at them and wondering if the mottling has maybe given them a somewhat pictorial quality. What do you think?
I could maybe enter them in a camera club competition and tell them I used my William Mortensen Photoshop filter on the images. It could work.
They look a bit like they’ve been printed through grease-proof paper, a minor fad in the early 90s if I remember correctly.
It’s a pity they came out the way they did as I quite like both shots. One is of the outdoor swimming pool at Cellardyke in Fife and the other is the harbour wall/breakwater at St Monans a couple of miles down the coast.
I’ll get round to printing them at some stage and I think they’ll look better than they do in the scans. Whether the mottling is too great to put up with remains to be seen.
I’ll get round to printing them at some stage and I think they’ll look better than they do in the scans. Whether the mottling is too great to put up with remains to be seen.
For my part, straight printing can be boring, and pictorialism is by far my favorite era/style of photography. As they stand, they’re just at the first stage of a potentially creative process and new way of looking at your images. One person’s gimmick is another person’s style.
ReplyDeleteYou might well find they're not too bad printed. It does have that pictorialist thing. WAAAAAAAY back, using an SLR, I used to breathe on my lens and then watch as the mist cleared and take a picture - worked really well!
ReplyDeleteI have had the same issue. I normally shoot 5x4 but occasionally use a Yashica 124. I've never encountered this before, despite using old film/much-travelled film/using in damp conditions etc so I don't think dev/fix/humidty are to blame.... Interestingly there's a post in DPReview (yes!) Sept 2020 of someone with exactly this problem. Ilford appears to have acknowledged a problem, and gave a link and form to fill.
ReplyDeleteIn the last year I have also