What’s redscale photography? I didn’t know either at first – I saw some “redscale film” for sale and started asking about it, and found out that it’s nothing more than ordinary film, but reversed. Photographic film has layers of chemicals in a certain order to produce the best effect, and as light enters the camera and hits the film it is absorbed in the chemical reactions that take place, from “front to back”. When you reverse the film, not only does the light have to go through the film itself, but it hits the rearmost layer of chemicals first, and then goes in reverse order from normal. After you develop and scan the film, remember to “flip” it, as everything will be backward in the end.
So how do you get redscale film? Well, you can buy it, or you can take ordinary film, put it inside a lightproof bag, and then pull it out of its canister, cut it, flip it, and then carefully feed it back into its canister. I imagine in confuses the film developers when they open the canister and the film wants to curve in the wrong direction, but life’s hard I guess.
So why take “backward” pictures? Just for the fun of it – to see what kind of interesting effects you can get. I suppose you could create this effect using a photo editing program, but I don’t think it would be quite as cool or interesting. You also get different variants, depending on how much light you let in. For instance, check out this church steeple, taken in redscale:
and compare it to a “normal” photo of the same steeple:
Or compare this neighborhood scene with one taken using a normal digital camera:
And look what happens here to these roofs and sky:
The point is, you don’t quite know how things will turn out until you develop the film.
I find the ones with a bit more red/rust tint to be especially pleasing. Here are a couple of my favorites:
See more redscale photos I have taken in this redscale set on Flickr, or check out the Flickr redscale group, which has some really interesting photos. Maybe tomorrow I’ll upload / share a few that have a more reddish effect for comparison.
