In October 2026 I attended an analog photography workshop hosted by Chris and Moni in their „Viewfinder Villa“ that was dedicated to „experiments with film“ and „wild chemistry“. The topic was unconventional methods, extreme pushes and pulls, caffenol, cyanotypes and so forth.
Two weeks previously, I had shot a lovecraftian LARP and had briefly toyed with the idea of creating a „solarisation“ effect on the negatives to create an eerie atmosphere but didn’t dare to for fear of ruining film from an actual shoot.
What better opportunity to try something new and wild than a „film extreme“ workshop?
I ran the idea past Moni and Chris on the first day of the workshop and was assigned the task to do some research on specific methods or recipes as a prepoeration for day two.
The first thing I found out during my search was that „solarisation“ is not the proper term but that I was thinking of pseudo-solarisation aka the Sabattier effect. Finding specific recipes or instructiuons turned out not to be an easy task because while all descriptions of the effect mention the possibility of working on the negative, apparently the effect is usually applied while printing and not on the negative.
This is perfectly reasonably, of course, because this way you only ruin a print and can start over, while you ruin the unique original when working on the negative.
But Hey! Wild chemistry, right?
Of the few detailed descriptions I did find, one dealt with dry plates in one case and another creates contour images by combining several sheet film negatives. Both approaches were not really feasible with the material and time at hand in the workshop.
But the general gist of several less detailed descriptions was that you basically underexpose the film slightly, start developing, expose the film to light one third to two thirds into the dev time and reduce the dev time slightly.
So I started day two of the workshop with a plan:
- Shoot a roll of Fomapan 100 in my Pentacon six
- Use box speed – 1.5 EV
- MDC suggests 6 Minutes in HC-110 (B), so we’ll do 5:30.
- at approximately 2:45 we open the tank for about a second
I was fairly certain that we would probably ruin the film entirely. Most descriptions of the process on the Web suggest extensive testing, trial runs, exposure series and so forth, all of which was not feasible with 120 film during the workshop.
I shot a roll of film around the villa and started development as described above. At about 2:45, I opened the tank just long enough to take a photo.
I did not time the exposure precisely but I would guess that it was between one and two seconds. I did not remove the reel from the tank. I considered the possibility of this resulting in an uneven exposure to be a good thing, because that might show passable result in some areas, even if others were ruined.
The best thing in analog photography is always the moment when you take a film from the tank and see bright and dark areas and this is especially true when wou just tried something weird.
At first I wasn’t sure what the actual effect was but on closer inspection of the negatives, the blackened margins and the haloing around the film markings showed that we actually achieved a Sabattier effect at least in part of the images.
Chris made some preliminary scans and much fun was had reviewing the results.
