Kodak Ultramax 400 is a personal favorite of mine. It’s dependable, easily available, and you always know what you’re getting when you pop a roll in your camera.
I reach for Ultramax on vacations, family get-togethers, or really anything general purpose where I want contrasty and saturated daylight-balanced results for.
But, occasionally… it’s fun to use that Ultramax punch for something a little crazy!
Before getting into the techniques I used to create the images for this project, I wanna share the backstory and the inspiration that led to its cyberpunk’ish theme.
I work as a home services contractor, so I’m constantly at Lowes picking up job materials. Each time I visit, I’m greeted by this giant mobile surveillance tower in the parking lot that repeats a pre-recorded message about how “you’re being monitored right now“. Creepy, right? Oh, and it gets better! (Worse?). Inside the store, at all the checkout stations are screens that display live footage of you with a bold red stripe of text that flashes “RECORDING IN PROGRESS”.
We get it. People steal stuff.
Compile this wonderfully Orwellian shopping experience on top of recently learning about something called Flock– a nationwide AI-driven surveillance network that tracks your vehicles.
Needless to say, I started to think that Minority Report was actually becoming a documentary.
[/rant complete]
So, now that you know the setup, I’ll walk you through how to create these dystopia-laden images and what methods I used.
The first step was to mark out my shutter window on the film, because I had planned to reshoot the roll a second time and I wanted my frames to lineup.
I was trying to go for the feel of overreaching technology by splitting or distorting the image and incorporating repetition.
To do this I grabbed a few filters- a Tiffen split-prism filter and my holographic filter (which is actually just a lens taken out of a cheap pair of kaleidoscope sunglasses).
After shooting all 36 frames with the filters, I rewound and reset it back to the same starting point. Then, in a dark room I used my computer monitor to project messages of white text and a black background (which I again split using the Tiffen prism filter).
With the second roll of Ultramax I got a bit more adventurous- I used all the techniques from the first, but stacked on a few more!
In addition to the filters and text, I used India ink, water, and rubbing alcohol to create masks for the second exposures. The purpose of these is to obscure the background letting only certain parts of the original image bleed through.
And finally, I red-scaled the roll without actually redscaling the roll.
What?
OK, I cheated a little. Originally, these Ultramax rolls were going to be exposed on both sides, but instead of re-shooting through the back side of the film, I just slapped a red 25A filter on the lens. And it worked! Kinda.
Using a deep red filter on color film instead of redscaling gives you a similar heavy red cast like redscale film, but it’s not an identical result. It doesn’t scatter the light in the same way because you’re shooting through the transparent film base or antihalation backing or shooting through the film dyes backwards.
Minor differences aside, it definitely achieved the look I was after, and when combined with the black ink allowed the true color of the photo bleed through.
All in all, I’m pretty happy with these images. In hindsight, I could have maybe improved the set by projecting a wider variety of phrases, or noting what I shot in the first exposure scenes to better line up subjects with the corresponding text.
Other things I could try in the future would be maybe using red, blue, and green filters to create a glitched out multiple exposures. Something like channel-separation in photoshop but without the digital manipulation.
I’m not sure yet what I’ll do with my favorites from this set. It might be fun to put together a zine, or make a few postcards to drop in Etsy film orders.
Just a reminder- there’s no patent on fun ideas, so feel free to steal these techniques and go make something cool for yourself.
If you want a visual overview and a more in-depth description of the process (with a ton of additional example images) check out the related video linked below.