Unexpectedly, I got two disks in the post this morning. A couple of weeks ago I’d posted a couple of film off to be processed – one of which, I’d forgotten about for years.

The nerdy short-hand of what’s going on here: Deadstock Provia tranny, shot with a SMENA 8M and a Lomo Fisheye with colour ringflash Xpro’d through C41.

What does that mean?

The non nerdy version: I shot some fairly random stuff, using 135mm film colour reversal ‘Transparency’ or ‘Slide’ film. (The type that you used to see mounted into those little plastic frames then loaded into a projector. )

From there, I asked a specialist photo lab to “Cross Process” the film through in effect, the wrong chemicals. You’re supposed to develop colour slide film using a chemical process called E6 – instead, I asked them to use C41 – Cross Processing.

The colour shift is greatly effected by doing this – another contributing factor to the fairly wild pallet would be that I was using film that was way past sell by date – or ‘Dead Stock’. The films used here, expired in 2001. That’s nearly as old as DragonDrop.org.

The cameras I used; the fish eye effect is a lens that as a 170 degree field of vision – on a camera called a Lomo FishEye. The other camera, is an old Russian number called the SMENA 8M. A very cheap, mass production camera designed to compete with the Kodak phenomenon that was sweeping The West at the time.

The lomo moto was certainly adhered to in the creation of a fair few of these.. “Don’t think, just shoot”.