Redscale Fail

I received my Nikon FG in the mail this week, and ran a test roll through it this weekend. I redscaled the film before shooting (ie: film was respooled upside down so that the emulsion side is facing away from the lens), and so the results were terrible - lack of tonal range as highlights were just plain red, and shadows were blocky black shapes. This was due to underexposure of the redscaled film (apparently, you need to overexpose by 2 to 3 stops to get a good range of red and amber hues, whereas I only overexposed 1 stop). Anyways, long story short, the redscaled version of these shots were horrible, so I converted them to black and white, which actually gave them an awesome lo-fi vintage look. These photos clearly are not representative of what this camera is capable of, but I really like b&w treatment. The grit and stains on the film are not digital trickery - the lab at Superstore is shit, and they clearly don't know how to process/ handle film, resulting in splotchy negatives that I couldn't be bothered to properly clean before scanning. Click to enlarge and see the grainy, gritty goodness in glorious detail.










3 days of work before we fly to San Francisco!
-G

Update (11-01-2010): View my first successful test roll here.