Earlier today I found an ancient, undeveloped roll of film in an old box among frames, monkey beads, and Cowboy Bebop figurines. Thinking that the last time I used film was around 2003, I called around to see who still developed film. Turns out the CVS up the street has a 1-hour photo. I returned an hour later to find the film was blank. “We’re sorry, this roll appears to be blank. No charge!”
Once outside, I ripped open the package spooled the film into the sunlight. There were some faint artifacts on these negatives! Having no film scanner and no desire to spend any money, I knew that if I properly back-lit these, I could take a macro photo of them with my digital camera and play with the levels in Photoshop. Oddly enough, I found some success.
I cut up some cardboard to block out the light, made a place to align the negatives, and used part of a plastic Target bag as a light diffuser. I placed the whole thing over an up-turned desk lamp and used the digital macro mode on my Canon PowerShot SD1100IS to take photos at 80 ISO.
It turns out these photos were over 15 years old! These are from the inside of my suburban Indiana house growing up. I have no idea why I took these, or who the little girl is. Creepy!
Girl on a bus
Kitchen window, crazy curtains
Jenn-Air grill
The moral of the story is that you can definitely capture and invert color negatives at home with materials you already have! The bubbly artifacts are from the stretched piece of white Target bag I’m using to diffuse the light bulb in my lamp. I really had to get creative with the color levels for things to show up properly. My process was to invert the negative, then take each color channel and compress the levels and match the peak, then compress the whole RGB composite sliders. Creepy youth extraction!