Let's See What Develops...

I thought I would share this with anyone who is interested in instant film and its creative potential. The image above, taken with out-of-date instant film stock, provided me with a very unexpected result. This image was an experiment with double exposure but when taken looked totally under-exposed and therefore uninteresting, and so was therefore thrown in the bin, luckily I didn't empty the bin on the same day, but the following day opened the din to put some rubbish in and on top was this well developed image.

I know that this type of film can prove unstable and it can be interesting to scan or copy it over a period of time, as the chemicals continue to work, subtly changing the appearance of the image but never before have I seen instant film do this. I really love the "milky" effect that has occurred here making the film similar to the now unavailable Polaroid Artistic Z film stock I used to really love. The film I had been using for this double exposure was Impossible Push PX 70 Colorshade this was an early batch of experimental film which is known to unstable and to add to this was well out of date, but had shown it exposed fine for single exposures, so hadn't expected two lower intensities of exposure to do anything different. The moral here is to not throw any of your instant film away for at least 24 hours after taking an image.

For those of you who are reading this blog article, and wondering why I use such out of date film stock, this is solely for my own project work and the uncertainty and uniqueness of each capture, which I believe greatly enhances the creative process.

In respect to seeing this film evolve or continue to develop over a period of time here are some images from an earlier blog on the the Instant Lab and then another look at them taken with the same film stock as above some weeks later.

Here are the images straight after they had developed showing a very unique colour banding due to a chemical breakdown due to ageing of the film stock:

Twenty days later the same images can be seen individually below, they have not been exposed to strong day light so the changes are many due to the chemical state continuing to change and thereby giving these mush more subtly softer shades :

I will be running a mini workshop about instant film at the studio later this year, so if this sort of thing interests you, be sure to check this out on my tuition blog.