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Look ma, no Photoshop

Tess

No pixels have been harmed in the making of this image..!  It is straight un-retouched scan of a photograph I took around 15 years ago of a girl called Tess, for a calendar project and employs no special make-up or Photoshop.

The image was shot on Kodak Ektachrome colour slide film processed in colour print C41 chemistry rather than normal E6 slide developer – a technique called cross-processing which yields a negative rather than a slide, with pumped up contrast and super saturated colours. It’s a technique commonly used nowadays in Lomography to enhance the Lomo camera’s unique colour shift and can give striking, though sometimes quite harsh, results with 35mm film, but when shot on larger formats (this image was shot on 120 roll film) the results are far more subtle giving a negative with more scope for control at the printing stage.

I recall it took me several hours and lots of hair tugging to get the final print ( I used to spend far more time than is healthy in the darkroom back in those days!) and involved a fair bit of fiddling with colour filtration settings to get the desired result. It makes me appreciate how much easier it is to achieve such results nowadays, with Photoshop, sat at a computer with a coffee in hand, rather than hours stuck in a hot, dark and stinky darkroom.

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