Well, it’s February 24, and #BIFscale17 is drawing near its end. For my 5th and final redscaled roll, for now, I went with EI 25 and the XA, and I tried to shoot under a variety of circumstances: morning, day, night, afternoon, hip shots, bird’s eye, snail’s eye, stabilized, just about everything I could think of, except flash, shoot, shoot, shoot, shoot, shoot, shoot, shoot, shoot, shoot.
It was a lot of shooting, and I’ve finally tamed the Red Dragon, more or less, but I’m glad #BIFscale only rolls around once per year.So, Redscaling in the dark… you can kinda get a dark, futuristic thing or something with it, and with a 2″ maximum shutter speed on the XA, walking figures almost disappear.
Not bad, really, and if I lived in a city, or if I got out at night, I could see some possibilities with this. As it is, though, I stay in a suburban neighborhood in Irving, TX, and don’t get out after dark much.
Most of the rest of the roll was a bit boring, really. Oh well.
Looking back, EI 25 might be a bit yellow, and maybe EI 50 would be better in daylight. Indoors, I think 25 works the best, especially with strong highlights, but EI 100 was too dark, EI 3 was way too yellow, EI 25 is better but maybe not red enough, and so EI 50 might be just right.
But I did get some really nice abstracts, both hip shots on my way to the car after work one day: one from the touchy shutter; the other just by accident. I’m very happy with both.
First up, the Happy Accident:
It could maybe do with a bit of cropping: that sea of yellow/orange at the bottom is a bit boring, but I really like the blurry squiggle running across the top and the suggestion of a figure in there. I hadn’t really seen these sorts of blur results from the XA before, but I’m pretty sure I know what happened. I just need to run some tests with other films and see if I can repeat it and what it looks like in color and black & white.
This great blur/bokeh/whatever gets even better in this next one, and with all apologies to Jon Wilkening, whose work probably opened my eyes a bit more to shots like this:
Wow. Do I think that would be better in color or black & white? Maybe. But this works very well just like this, and is certainly among my #BIFscale17 favorites: MashaAllah.
So that brings me to the end of #BIFscale17. To be honest, I’m glad to see it go. I’m not the biggest fan of redscale, and maybe I never got it, but out of 5 rolls worth of pictures (4 rolls @36 exposures – 15 shots per roll fogged by the factory + 1 self-spooled roll = ~100 shots), probably 1/4 would’ve looked better in color, and I’m looking forward to getting back into more usual film stocks.
InshaAllah, I’ll do a best of #BIFscale17/Red Dragon review post next week, and then, it’ll be time to get back to my usual shooting, participate in the @TMAXparty, and whatever else comes up.
