Fuji Instant Film — Expecting the Unexpected

Yesterday my friend baroque bass player Curtis Daily from Portland and I took some pictures of wonderful Olena in my little studio and in the piano room. The piano room photos with Daily’s bass were most interesting. They will appear in Medium on another day. What you see here scans from two Fuji instant films. Alas the 3200 ISO b+w instant film was discontinued but I still have a few boxes left. The other a 100 ISO Instant Colour is still being made available by the Fuji Film Company who will soon, at the present rate of film discontinuance (A Kodak word!), will have to eliminate the word film from their corporate logo.

The colour picture is a result of a process that is not ever too predictable. After snapping the shot I peel the picture (in about 90 seconds). I quickly go to my waiting scanner and with a paper towel I press it firmly onto the glass and make sure it makes complete contact. The picture scans as a negative and I then reverse it in Photoshop. The colour you see here is exactly the colour that is there with the reversal. I play with contrast and with levels. I make a high resolution scan (I can never return to the effect!) and then I make a smaller copy for here.

The second photograph is the peel (15 second wait!), dried well with a hair dryer and then scanned and reversed.

I used a Mamiya RB-67-Pro-SD with a 90mm lens. For the colour shot I fired a small Chimera softbox. For the b+w I used the existing modeling light with the camera on a tripod.

I also used my wonderful Fuji X-E1digital camera but there is no way I could reproduce this effect without first seeing what to copy. Should I want to copy the effect would not do so. The unexpected effects seem to me interesting and there can never be two that look exactly the same.