This first of a few of my "specialist" films I am testing brought some interesting results. Seeing the world in tones of purple can be a weird but fun experience.
In addition to going through the more traditional films, I wanted to test out a few "specialist" ones. I did some research and ended up buying this Lomography Purple Chrome film, an infrared film, and one called "colour explosion". Without going into the chemistry of the film (not that I understand it all myself), these films should produce some extreme results. I gather this is more prominent when you take photographs under varying conditions (e.g. how under or over exposed the photo is, or how bright or dark it is outside).
I decided to start with the Lomography Purple Chrome film. I understand it is trying to mimick a very famous (and out of production) Kodak Aerochrome film. So this film kind of does what it says on the tin - it makes things turn purple! In particular the colour green. So with this in mind I had a think about what locations would produce some interesting results in and around Frankfurt, in a week where I was not travelling anywhere special. I came up with two in particular:
Palmengarten - a large 22 hectare botanical garden very close to my house (www.palmengarten.de)
Frankfurt cemetery - the largest cemetery in the city. Enormous and very old (1820s), with lots of really cool looking statues. Dr. Alzeimer is even buried there.
Palmengarten itself is quite nice, it is basically a big park with various greenhouses with lots of tropical looking plans. As you would expect from a botanical garden. The main thing for me is that it had lots of green, yellow, red and other colours as we were in the last week of Autumn.
Angry bird!
I got quite a few shots around the botanical garden looking for as much green as possible (as in theory this would turn to purple). I suspect the effect is strongest on a bright day (it was cloudy) and with potentially a lower ISO. The ISO for this film is changeable (100 - 400). I had it set to 400 for a typical all round film. Some of the shots are below - they are darker than I thought they would be, but overall quite interesting!
(clicking on any photo will make it full screen and slideshow)
There are only so many photos one can take of trees and leaves so I decided to move on to the cemetery and I had about 15 shots left. The cemetery is more like a park in of itself, and it is enormous. The older graves are closer to the entrance and some of them are extremely lavish, with entire families buried in one plot. You can sense the wealth, with lots of famous sounding names. At first I was a bit apprehensive to start taking photos inside a cemetery (bad luck and all), but as I was walking through I turned round the corner and saw a group of at least 15 photographers with huge cameras and tripods! They asked me if I wanted to join their workshop but I politely declined. That's just too many geeks in one place if you ask me.
My favourite shots of the cemetery are below. Some of these are very "moody" and fit well with the whole cemetery theme. However, this film overall is a bit too specialist for me to use again. It is a bit hit and miss, and there is probably a limited amount of "that purple look" you'd want to get out of your photographs. It was fun experimenting with it though.
Overall result: FAIL (too specialist to use more than once if I am honest)
At any rate, at least these photos are more interesting than my last two posts - so that was a good result!
I hope you enjoyed reading this and as always - stop reading this and go take more photographs!
Cheers,
Neil
(clicking on any photo will make it full screen and slideshow)
