Irida The Shapeshifter, a monochrome nude study on Kentmere 400.

After what seemed like a lifetime of phtographing dribs and drabs on film, then having to wait ages to save up money/film rolls to get developed in a big batch (sometimes throwing mine in with friends) was just the only way to get development and scans in a post digital world.. However, I got rather sick and tired of having to fork out my hard earned coins only to recieve generally poor quality, low res scans back from the labs. I once even had one of the larger camera labs in the UK (cough-cough-jessops-cough) completely ruin a bunch of images on a roll of medium format Portra.. Anyway, There came a time in 2021 when I decided enough was enough, I was going to start developing and scanning my own film. This meant I would personally handle my own images from start to finish, alleviating many of my previous anxieties associated with using commercial labs, including, but not limited to, worrying about my images being seen/stolen by some adolescent minimum wage camera store techie.

I shot this roll of film with Irida in the space of about 20 minutes. I had planned to shoot a roll of black and white film to practice and play with, however we only had a small amount of time at the end of session left and I had to think on my feet to get something in the bag.. The images you see were shot quickly and completely spontaneous, there was no plan as it was the final squeeze of a photo session.. Little did I realise that it would take almost 7 months from shooting this ‘quick’ roll till I would eventually iron out the details of how to make a quality scan that could be reposted in the digital world. It was a struggle as scanning negatives is a tricky business. This poor roll of film had to follow me through some of the most messy and turbulent times of life to date, as I was splitting my time living in my car and on a friends boat. The film got dragged through many prototype scan trays, shoved in various boxes and drawers an generally being abused. giving it many bends and small scratches, most of which I have left un-edited as they form part of the story now..

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