crossprocessed | LostAruban

Analogue Colombia

By: Nestor

17-02-2013

Colombia, Event & Location, Olympus Mju 2

These are the scans of photo’s I took in Colombia in various cities. I used my silver Olympus Mju 2 which I have sadly lost along with some Lomo Xpro 100 film. I scanned the negatives myself with an Epson V500 and left the borders on since I felt it gave the images more of an analogue feeling.

Above is street parade/party in Bogota. This is a weekly occurrence where they close of the streets for some music and fun.

A hill overlooking the city of Popayán. The city has their own versions of empanadas and they are really awesome.

A small cemetery we came across in Barichara.

Farewell to Holga

By: Nestor

06-09-2012

Camera Gear Overview, Holga

This was the last roll of film I shot in my Holga. It’s been almost a year now. The Sprocket Rocket has fulfilled my sprocket needs. The Holga was fun, but especially this last roll shows the deficiencies of the Holga. The amount of light leaks was pretty crazy despite all the miles of tape I had used. It was my first time shooting with the not-so-cheap Lomo Xpro 100 film and seeing the result overwhelmed with orange/red light leaks wasn’t exactly ideal. So here are the last shots from my Holga. At one point in time I will pick it back up again, but not any time soon.

The only outdoor park escalator I have ever seen. At Fort Canning.

Cross processed film extravaganza

By: Nestor

20-06-2012

Roll of Film Review

Buckle up ! And here we go.

I went trough most of my scanned film and picked out the various types of films I have cross processed along the way. Results always vary so I thought this would give a nice overview. Off course these results aren’t representative of all situations. Variations are depending on film lab, processing, use of expired film, time of the day, the stock market in Japan, whale routes in the Atlantic, so basically everything.

Roll 1: Fuji Sensia 100 Expired and very green shot with a Canon 500.

Roll 2: Fuji Sensia 100 Expired, much better balance in colour tones shot with light-leaky Olympus mju-2

Roll 3: Fuji Sensia 100 expired, shot with a Holga and a heavy tint of Pink/purple.

Roll 4: Fuji Provia 100 expired, shot with Golden Half and same as roll 3, a bit pink.

Roll 5: Fuji Provia 400 expired. Unlike its brother, no Pink ! Greener tint.

Roll 6: Fuji Tungsten 64, shot with Canon 500 and a hint of a blue tint, but pretty balanced.

Roll 7: Kodak Ektachrome, expired. Taken with an Olympus Trip.

Roll 8: Kodak Ektachrome, FRESH, taken with a leaky Olympus mju 2.

Roll 9: Kodak Elite Chrome, FRESH, shot with Holga, muddy looking results.

Roll 10, Lomo X-PRO 100, fresh. bit underexposed but maybe due to Sprocket Rocket.

Roll 11: Lomo X-PRO 100, fresh. Bright colors, hard contrast, current favorite xpro film.

Roll 12: AGFA CT precisa, fresh. My all time favourite but dead xpro film. Hard contrast and vibrant colours. I will miss you CT precisa ( the new version is not the same, imposter !)

Pinkplosion: Expired Xpro Provia

By: Nestor

03-06-2012

Roll of Film Review

A major part of the fun of shooting with A) Film B) a Plastic lens toy camera C) Expired film D) slidefilm which then will be developed in the “wrong” chemical process is the unpredictability. I went out and shot some expired Fuji Provia 400 slidefilm in my plastic lens Golden Half. I got the film crossprocessed and this was the result. A 4-year old girls dream where Hello Kitty and some Disney princess rubbed themselves all over my film. A Pinkplosion. Off course I make the promise to never x-pro provia again but what if the next time it won’t be all pink, but some other color? Shouldn’t I at least try and find out?

The results of trying to remove the pinkness of the image. A muddy image. Not my favorite.

Cross Processed Vietnam

By: Nestor

01-02-2012

Roll of Film Review

Ninh Binh, Vietnam was amazing. Small villages, farmers working in the rice fields, little kids waving and yelling “hello” as I passed by on a bicycle one day and a scooter the other. Just a couple of hours outside of Hanoi and welcome change of pace. I brought allow my Olympus Mju2 and a roll of Lomo XPro 100. As you can see the contrast is very strong. The darks are dark and the brights are very bright. There isn’t as much of a color shift but more saturation of the colors. It reminds me alot of the old Agfa CT precisa, one of my favourite films that sadly does not exist like that anymore.

For those too lazy a chunk of text

Pros: 1) No typical Xpro color shift 2) Saturation 3) contrast

Cons 1) Expensive 2) Really hard contrast easy to blow out highlights

I’m surprised the Lomo marketing department didn’t do anything more excitement with their container design. I like their other designs and I’m kinda surprised they kept this one so simple. I like minimalistic (check out this blog design) but this is bordering almost on the boring. But in the end it does not effect the photo’s in any way, shape or form, so I don’t know what I am babbling about.

The only photo in this series not taking in Ninh Binh but in Hanoi. I loved these daily used train tracks going through busy parts of the city.

My fellow travel mates I met in Ninh Binh; Two French guys and a German girl.

Kodak Ektachrome E100S XPRO

By: Nestor

22-12-2011

Roll of Film Review

Accoring to Wikipedia Cross processing (sometimes abbreviated to Xpro) is the procedure of deliberately processing photographic film in a chemical solution intended for a different type of film.

This normally means taking slidefilm (E-6) film and developing it as if it was regular negative film. This results in shifted colors and stronger contrast.

So why would any sane person do this?

1) It’s fun and unpredictable. You never truly know what you will get. Especially if you throw expired film into the mix
2) Developing as slidefilm is more expensive, so its actually cheaper to develop as slide film is you are able to find a lab

The following photo’s were taken with my Holga and Kodak Ektachrome E100S. This was then crossprocessed and scanned to show the sprockets. And the results are uh, well uh, green. Kermit-the-frog-exploded-in-my-camera-green. In my past experience the green shift has never been this strong with Ektachrome, but in this case it went all the way.

On the left is hotel I stay at for business in New Jersey and on the right is an abandoned housing complex in Singapore now used by the military for practice urban warefare.

Flying over Chicago after the midwest.

Holga Wide Angle Converter Review

By: Nestor

14-10-2011

Camera Gear Overview

I shot a roll of lomo 100 X-pro in my holga to review that type of film and this new wide lens adapter. I ran out of my usual electrical tape that I use to keep my holga lightleak tight and in one piece. I picked up a new roll of regular black tape and obviously it did a very bad job, in fact it did such a horrible job I wonder if it sneaked in its photon buddies and let them go to town on my film resulting in horrendous orange light leaks all over my pictures.

I could make up a story that this was my artistic intention in order to portray the fragility of perfection and the honesty of failure but that would be a big bowl of shit. So lets get to the review.

The top part is the regular Holga Lens and the bottom image is with the converter. I picked up this converter for $13 on Ebay because I was interested in buying the latest lomo camera: the sprocket rocket.

The main advantage the sprocket rocket has over shooting 35mm in a Holga is its wide angle lens and the ease of forwarding the film without having to deal with counting clicks. I was wondering if this converter would be wide enough to dissuade me from buying the sprocket rocket and stay loyal to my 5 year old Holga. After looking at the results I can honestly say “I don’t know”

It does create a wider image, that is the positive. The bad side is that the normally blurry edges of my Holga images are now even more distorted and vague.

But it is hard to judge this lens just one roll of film which was badly abused by lightleaks. I will have to give this lens another chance before I pass my judgment upon it and then decide if I want to add the sprocket rocket to my collection of cameras.

Fuji Sensia 100 Crossprocessed

By: Nestor

16-04-2011

Roll of Film Review

Fuji slidefilm 100 Sensia. Shot with my Canon 500 and 50mm lens. The results have a strong contrast and heavy green tint. Not as green as previous tries with this film.

Not a great film to shoot people due to the skin color with but street scenes turn out decently.

Give it a try if you are a fan of the color green or shoot desolate street scenes. Probably my favorite Fuji slide film to cross process.

Stepping all over Singapore

Rare sighting of Graffiti in Singapore ( off course this was government approved)

Kampong Glam.

Arab Street.

Hiding out.

Some editing trying to reduce the green tint and get more human like skin tones. Not easy working with scanned film.

Arab Street Mural.

Camera Review Series: The Golden Half

By: Nestor

14-01-2011

Camera Gear Overview

I have always been fascinated with Half Frame Camera’s (cameras that give two vertical images on one frame of film). I always appreciated the increased efficiency of turning a 36 roll of film into 72 exposures. But even more than that is the new perspective of framing and composition of taking two images and creating one new complete image.

A couple of years ago I kept unsuccessfully bidding on the Olympus Pen series and Canon Demi on Ebay. In the end I settled on a Olympus Trip since I loved the esthetics of this camera so much. But this camera was a traditional single frame camera and it wasn’t until I got a Golden Half Camera as a Christmas gift that I had my first half frame camera.

Good and Great things:

This camera is small and light. This is the lightest and smallest camera I own. This one truly is one of those that fits in your pocket.

It has a hot shoe. Most toy cameras don’t have a flash also don’t have a hot shoe. It even works with a

Even though it is a plastic build, it somehow feels pretty solid and also because it is plastic I don’t worry about it too much and let it bang around wherever I carry it to.

Not so great and bad things:

In my experience I needed allot of light, or some very fast film to get good results. But that is to be expected when you are dealing with a camera with a plastic lens and no manual controls.

Because of the lack of the build in flash, one you do throw a flash on it, you have doubled its size and weight.

Like all half frame cameras ( AFAIK, let me know if I am wrong) you don’t know which frame you are shooting on. It is frustrating to take two great contrasting images right after one another and then when you pick up your developed film, they were on two different frames.

Outside of the center the image is pretty soft.

Cartier-Bresson Top Tip:

If you want to make absolutely sure you have two desired subjects on the same frame then you should do the following: Take a picture of one subject first, then take a picture of the second subject and then go back to the first subject. This means you are “wasting” one half frame, but since you have 72 images to take it isn’t that bad, plus you never know that what unexpected paired images give you.

Conclusion:

It’s a nice fun light affordable way to get into half frame photography. But personally I would recommend to go for an Olympus Pen. You would have to pay a little bit more, but end up with a very sexy camera, manual controls and a fast 2.8 lens.

Click here for More Golden Half Pictures !

Other films you can use with this Golden Half camera:

Fuji Sensia Xpro
Kodak 400 Tmax Black and White
Fuji Superia 200
Lomo 800 Color
Kodak 160 VC

Light leaks and you.

By: Nestor

13-01-2011

Photography Philosophy

Love them or hate them, but when you are a fan of older film camera’s these unpredictable elements are often a reality. I am myself caught in between. More often than not I prefer my images without light leaks, but sometimes, they do make an image better in an unpredictable manner.

I have three cameras with light leaks, my Lubitel 2, Holga 120N and cheap older Olympus Mju 2. All of them except the Mju 2 I can tape up and make light leaks proof. Despite rolling my Mju2 in kilometers of tape, somehow light is still coming in through a hole that wasn’t the lens. In the end I resorted to buying another Mju2.

Some opinions on Light leaks I found across the wide world of the web

“Yuck, how do I get rid of these things? Is there any hope or should I suck it up and buy a new camera?”
“I love my Holga light leaks, I often drop my cam on purpose in order to create more exciting and unexpected leaks. Does this work on kids too?”
“These non-visible lights are actually auras and gives us an insight into other dimensions and spirit worlds that communicate to us through light leaks and expired negative or slide film”

— LostAruban

Analogue Colombia

Farewell to Holga

Cross processed film extravaganza

Pinkplosion: Expired Xpro Provia

Cross Processed Vietnam

Kodak Ektachrome E100S XPRO

Holga Wide Angle Converter Review

Fuji Sensia 100 Crossprocessed