These are All Fake
6 Frames wth my 1931 Voigtlander Brilliant and a Plugin
FILMSCAMERASPROCESSES
sonny rosenberg
7/8/20231 min read
This was a bit of one of those comedy of errors that seem to often bubble through the tenuous fabric of life (mixed metaphors? Who?), while not a true tragedy by any means, it does give one pause for thought, in the end you just have to laugh at all the myriad things that can go wrong in any given endevour, even as seemingly simple a thing as shooting a few frames with an old camera. (Do i need more clauses and commas in that sentence?)
I mean what could possibly go wrong? Allow me to count the ways: a) Since the death of my cute little Reveni meter I've been using an old Weston meter that I think is sometimes accurate. b) It seems that some of the shutter speeds on the old Voigtlander Brilliant are bit off. c) My current batch of Cinestill is getting quite long in the tooth and I think I over compensated for that. d) I mannaged to assemble the spool insert of my film tank backwards, which led to an interesting kind of bubble damage. e) As usual for me and 120 film, I managed a few light leaks.
All of these factors (and probably more that I can't think of right now) gave rise to a mildly interesting, very high contrast roll of Rollei Retro 80s. I do like the fact that it's easier than not to get very high levels of contrast with 80s but along with my crappy composition on these and the factors given above, these shots weren't all that presentable, even for me.
Coincidentally I've been experimenting with a Lightroom plugin called Exposure 7, that among myriad other things, does some not too horrible impressions of archaic photographic techniques. I'm currently enamored with a couple of it's 'wet plate' plugins. So what the hell, I used them here. Love em or hate em for actual or philosophic reasons, here they are.