If you need a fun film photography experiment to try out this week/weekend, how about giving black-and-white film reversal a shot? The folks at Branco Ottico decided to give this process a shot—turning multiple black-and-white negatives into rich, direct positive transparencies.

. . just because.

Branco Ottico's Davide Rossi detailed the whole process in a dual-language blog post and the video above. But if your first question is less "how" and more "why," he covers that as well:

Why reverse a black and white film to get a positive one?

Because it is the way to create a direct positve original by the extraordinary richness of detail, because it is unique and made alive by light, because you can make a backlight reveal the shape of an object.

It’s really a very detailed photograph, with fascinating nuances and deep densities, they take your eyes wondering marvelous.

Rossi promises that these direct positive transparencies look "alive" in a way that an inverted scan on a computer screen simply can't. "This is what I see when I shed my eyes in front of a slide created by a big 20x25cm camera," he writes. "Faces that live their own light with such a detailed skin roughness to make you smile because it does not even look alive with the your own eyes. "

Rossi was kind enough to share some behind the scenes and final images with us. Check them out for yourself in the galleries below:

$(document). ready(function() { SampleGalleryV2({"containerId":"embeddedSampleGallery_0759939532","galleryId":"0759939532","isEmbeddedWidget":true,"standalone":false,"selectedImageIndex":0,"startInCommentsView":false,"isMobile":false}) });

$(document). ready(function() { SampleGalleryV2({"containerId":"embeddedSampleGallery_8196077358","galleryId":"8196077358","isEmbeddedWidget":true,"standalone":false,"selectedImageIndex":0,"startInCommentsView":false,"isMobile":false}) });

Mind you, the process is no walk in the park. Even if you purchase a dedicated black-and-white film reversal kit online, each different film requires a different approach—then again, isn't that what makes this an experiment worthy of the name?

For Rossi, it took 4 days of trial and error to figure out an easy-to-reproduce three-step process that he will soon publish as a followup to this video.

If you want to give the experiment a shot for yourself, check out the video and blog post for yourself, stock your homebrew darkroom, and give it a go this weekend. If you want a bit more guidance, keep an eye on the Branco Ottico site for a detailed breakdown of Rossi's three-step process.

All photos by Davide Rossi/Branco Ottico and used with permission.

2017-8-31 20:11