Film soaking – colour film
Never tried film soaking before – read a couple of blogs before diving in and discovered there is a lot of bad advice on the net about this!
Test no. 1 – do not try and soak your film BEFORE you shoot it. I took an unexposed roll of 35mm colour film, dunked it into a soup of muddy river water for a couple of days, rinsed it and then tried to leave it in rice / air to dry it out….I popped it into a change bag to check if it was dry only to find a sticky, yucky mess! This roll has not gone anywhere near my camera yet – I am still waiting for it to dry out!
Test no. 2 – armed with this knowledge from test no. 1, I decided to shoot the film first and then soak it…but how can I send it off for colour processing when even after allowing for time to dry its still a sticky, yucky mess? Well, you can’t – so I have opted to try and process it at home, using a Cinestill C41 home dev kit. After I shot the film, I loaded it (without the film spiral) and in the dark, into a tank, added a soup of river water and mud with a dash of vinegar (to help the process along a bit). My thinking with not loading the film onto a spiral was so that while it was soaking, the film could still touch in places and therefore interact through contact as it would still loaded in its film canister. After a couple of days soaking, I then rinsed and processed.
Police mugshots – Sydney 1920s:
http://scan.net.au/scan/journal/display.php?journal_id=67
Quarantine blog:
https://dreamingofdownunder.com/travelaustralia/traveltipsinfo/hotel-quarantine-australia-experience/