Scanning Black And White As Colour.

©Jasmine Lord 2012

I work with some rather amazing photographers at Lomography. I feel rather privileged that I do. Even though I teach here and there when my schedule permits, part of what I can't let it go of, isn't just about sharing knowledge about their rad fun cameras, it's the people. One lomographer (there are many) whose work I admire very much, is Satomi Sugiyama. Satomi is based in LA and you'll find her often in the lab at the West Hollywood Lomography Gallery Store. Satomi's attention to detail is sharp and her knowledge of film is phenomenal. I will blog more about her incredible body of work another time. For now I would like to share something interesting that she shared with me.

I have, for sometime, steered clear of C41 black and white processed film. I find it bland. Really bland. I just plan don't like it. Till now. I saw a series of images from a collection Satomi was working on called Nightmare and her pictures had this green tinge to it. Anybody who knows Satomi knows that none of her work is has had photoshop correction done to it. EVER. It's almost like it's against her religion. Everything she does is in camera. (again, I would love to get her permission to share her work rather than just talk about it, so I promise a future article to come)

I had to ask... what stock she used? It was Ilford XP2, which needs C41 processing. Satomi then explained to me that she had the images scanned and printed in colour, resulting in the green tinge. The results looked great and suddenly there was new life to C41 B&W film stock.

So I took the image you see above on Kodak 400 C41, the same day I was testing pushing the TriX from 400 to 1600. I then sent the negative to Satomi via the Lomography Gallery Store & had it scanned in colour...and this is what I got back. I have to say, I'm pretty excited about it. I have more experimenting to do with it. I had actually forgotten what stock was in my SLR, it had been that long since I shot with it, so now I would like to go out and run more tests.

I defiantly recommend giving it a go yourself. As for Satomi's work, check out her recent stuff on www.lomography.com/homes/satomi, in the meantime, I'll see if I can get her to agree to an artist interview. ;-)

Happy shooting!!