Cross Processing Film – C41 in E6

In an earlier post I started talking about shooting film in the olden days.  It started me thinking about all of the hours I spent in the darkroom developing B&W film and printing.  I miss the process to be truthful.  You learn so much more about light and shadow when you are touching prints in the gloam of the darklight.  Don’t get me wrong, I love the things I can do with photoshop, but mainly I am glad I don’t have to use it if I don’t want.

The other day I was looking at some images that had been tortured to death by a photoshop user.  I just don’t understand why some people think that taking a badly conceived/composed/executed photograph and then beating it over the head with every photoshop plugin available creates a compelling image.  As Sexton Ming once sang, “You can’t polish a turd”.   Why not think about the image you want to create, think about the mood and feel of the image.  Pre visualize the idea until it forms fully in your mind.  Any image that comes through that process has at least an outside chance of being compelling.  At the very least it will convey your idea much more so than shooting crap and then wondering later if reversing the colors and making everyone’s hair green will be cool.  It won’t, I promise.

I grew up during the cold war.  My grade school training involved learning how to properly hide under my desk in case of a nuclear attack.  When desks stopped being big heavy wooden objects with inkwells (no kidding) and turned into smaller wire framed easily moved items, we started lining up in the hallways kneeling with our heads between our knees.  How stupid, I doubt that would have protected us for a tornado, let alone a blast.  It gave me some odd thoughts from time to time though.  I guess I have always wondered what would happen when society broke down.  Maybe more what snippets of life would look like.  I find dolls creepy, clowns also, but that’s a different worry.  I reasoned therefore, that everyone would need a baby doll in the mean streets of the broken future.

I am actually a very good B&W printer, at least I used to be.  I sold my darkroom gear several years ago and probably haven’t printed since 1997.  At the height of my printing interests I was trying lots of toners.  Lots of people I knew were in to selenium and sepia toners.  I of course had to be different and started working with The Photographer’s Formulary iron blue toner.  I loved the melancholy feel that the blue added to my work.  Since I was already shooting for morose, the blue was a complement rather than an additive.  The problem was that the color was really hard to duplicate across prints.  Very small differences in temperatures and mixtures yielded wildly different blues in both color and saturation.  Even in a small print batch, the colors would shift from one print to the next.

Looking back a few years, I remembered working in my College’s E6 processing line.  We had both a C41 (negative reversal film) and an E6 (positives/slides) line and sometimes students would put the wrong kind of film in our in boxes.  No way to tell what kind of film it was in the dark (actually not true since 4×5 film has ID notches on the upper right) so sometimes print film would end up being processed like a slide.  Kodak film tended to make a slide of odd but interesting blueish tones.  The process was fairly simple and repeatable.  You shot color print film, overexposed by a stop or so and then had it processed E6.  The only major drawback to this was that you ended up with a slide.  Slides are good for projection and for duplication, but back in the infancy of digital, fairly expensive to deal with.  You could have a cibachrome made from your positive, but that was about it.  Today with the might of scanners behind you, making a billboard from your slides is fairly simple.  Back then, it was an issue. to combat the problem, I dabbled with the opposite system: Processing slide film C41.  That will be another post though as this one is getting pretty long.