Quench Your Analogue Thirst with Pink Lemonade Film!

One hot summer night, I was really bored and really thirsty. I headed to the kitchen to make myself a glass of lemonade and sat back down on my computer to while away on the Internet. Then I read some articles about destroying film and decided to dunk some rolls in film soups!

I usually shoot with expired film but its plain, grainy look can literally get old. I threw a Kodak UltraMax roll into the beverage, marinated for 30 minutes, and let it dry (which I discovered is the tricky part).

Mostly, but I messed up during the drying part which is why the other two films I souped were exposed. I also did half-hour marinations in some white wine from Australia (2008 chardonnay) and in a hazardous mixture of household cleaning detergents (Kaboom, bleach, dishwashing soap). When I checked the film from the cleaning agents, the tongue had been stripped clear! Some people shot with their rolls before souping them, but I tried it the other way around which is why I had to get the drying part done before loading them into the camera to make sure the snappers wouldn’t get damaged.

I tried to dry them up by wrapping them in tissue and letting the liquids get absorbed. It worked a bit but the rolls weren’t completely dry. When I pulled a bit of the film out, some juices came with it and I didn’t want to load them into my cameras leaking. So I turned my bathroom into a temporary darkroom (covered the window, sealed the door cracks, etc.), pulled all the film out, and hung them out to dry on the shower rod. I was afraid that they’d get exposed since I could still see in the dark a little so I hastily towel-dried one roll and rewound it back into the canister. The other two were left to dry for half an hour which is probably why nothing came out of them.

It was an experiment upon an experiment because I was also testing a camera that I just got on eBay and I was blown away by the results!

Naturally, I didn’t care for the camera’s performance much (and I couldn’t really gauge its condition then) but the film definitely yielded some interesting photos, as seen in these abstractions. I especially loved the hazy, splotchy portraits. The colors are so trippy and gorgeous!

Overall, I love how the entire roll looked like psychedelic fragments of a dream.

The Pink Lemonade roll was a success and I’ll definitely be destroying more film soon!

See more photos from this roll in Pink Lemonade Film by denisesanjose.

written by denisesanjose on 2012-08-27 #gear #tutorials #film #developing #analogue-photography #tipster #destroy #color-negatives #35mm-films #film-soup