Sunday 27 November 2016

What's In The Box Is Outside The Box

It's been a while since I've made a good impulse buy, so I was well passed due for one when I ran across this lot at everyone's favourite auction site (or least favourite depending who you talk to, it seems there are no in betweens). I became the proud owner of five rolls of Svema CO-32d colour reversal film, expired just slightly before the Soviet Union itself, at a price I could easily shrug off if the experiment was a total failure.



It might seem like an odd way to go for someone such as myself who prefers good sized negatives made with excellent optics to produce full range black and white prints. At first blush it may strike you as a better choice for a member of the Holga toting, happy accident fostering, low fidelity image crowd. Though it may strike some as the polar opposite of what I usually go for I don't see it that way. One of the qualities I care about most in my images is character, however it's achieved.

Like many impulse buys however there were a few aspects to this one that might have given me pause had I taken more time to consider things. I knew a colour reversal film from what was then the Soviet Union probably wasn't made for the standard E6 process like the Fujichromes and Ektachromes of the same era, but I didn't think this would be a big deal since I intended to cross process in C41 chemistry anyway. It was only once it had arrived that I started to research my options for processing the stuff and what it turned up suggested a change of plan was needed. I found a thread in the APUG forums suggesting a standard C41 process would strip the image from the film, a suggestion that was corroborated by the scraps of information I was able to find elsewhere in my online searches. One commenter was stated this was simply the result of the relatively high temperatures typical of colour processes and that they'd be fine in C41 chemistry with extended development at room temperature. More numerous, and it seems to me authoritative, were claims that it was the bleach employed in C41 chemistry do in the images resulting in a blank strip of film at any temperature and that C22 chemistry was the only viable option if I didn't care to gather all the ingredients needed to reproduce the original ORWO reversal process, It can be hard enough getting my hands on standard chemistry sometimes and the quest (no doubt the expensive quest) to get my hands on the oddball chemistry needed couldn't be justified for the sake of these five rolls of film which might not work out in any case.

What's a guy to do? Improvise! Among the posts in that APUG thread I found was one that listed the recipes to make every step of the C22 process from raw chemistry. The active ingredient for the bleach step appeared to be just Potassium Ferricyanide which I keep around because of its uses in black and white print making. Having most of the other ingredients as well I matched the formula as well as I could to produce half a litre of experimental C22ish bleach.

Bleach is just one step in the colour process though, and it was only through luck that I had materials on hand to create a reasonable facsimile of the one chemical bath. For the rest of the process I'd have to wing it. Stitching together various other nuggets of advice either found through web searches or offered up in discussion forums in response to my own queries I put together the following plan based on a working temperature of 20oC
  1. Water pre-soak: 1 min
  2. Unicolor C41 developer: 20 min
  3. Stop bath (standard film dilution ): 2 min
  4. Water rinse: 2 changes w/ 30 sec agitation each
  5. C22ish bleach: 7 min
  6. EcoPro Clearfix (1:4): 6 min
Followed by the standard wash I would give to any black and white film. There's nothing special about the choice of fixer, this is just what I use for black and white processes. The only real departure from this plan was necessitated a discovery made when loading the film onto the reel for the daylight developing tank. Over the decades it seems the backing paper had begun to adhere to the back of the film. I suppose I could have dealt with this afterwards but if nothing else I didn't want little bits of black paper floating around the chemistry baths, most of which would be re-used. The pre-soak stage was increased from 1 minute to about 200 minutes with several changes of water supplemented with sessions in full darkness of rubbing little bits of damp paper off the surface of the film. The effort was largely, if not totally, successful.

As I pulled the film back off the reel following all of this it wasn't clear if my efforts had been in vain. Of course there was base fog like nobody's business with plenty of mottling and density variations, but while I could see that there was actual image hiding in there it wasn't clear if it would be usable. Not surprisingly my first attempts to scan them didn't look like much, revealing far more mottling than image, but I managed to find a trick. The messiness was confined to the red and green layers of the scans, but the blue layer was just the opposite, revealing just enough mottling to make it interesting. I wound up making two scans of each image, one a monochrome image weighted almost entirely to the blue channel, and a second scan made just for colour balance. I then pasted the first scan as a luminosity layer over the second colour scan. The results are what you see here.





As you can readily see, especially in the third image, my efforts to remove the adhered backing paper were not entirely successful. Another good soak might just clear away what remains, but I'm still unsure whether this is advisable or even desirable. I bought this film with a mind to achieving some interesting and unusual results and in my estimation at least it was a success. The only question now is whether to stick with what worked reasonably the first time or experiment to see if I can get something even more satisfactory. I metered for an ISO of 8 for most of the roll, going down further, maybe to 4 ISO, seems advisable. Perhaps a bit more time in the developer or perhaps mimicking the original process even further a short soak in a standard black and white developer before moving on to the colour developer might yield negatives that at the very least won't be as hard to work with. I've got some room to experiment at any rate. The Ukrainian seller had one more lot of 5 rolls left and I just claimed it. 

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