Not all experiments work out.

Most don’t.

This one... I think there’s something to be learned from it. Going into this experiment, I wanted to try to recreate the affect of souped film, without chemically altering the film. For anyone unfamiliar, souped film is film which has been “cooked” (soaked) in a “soup” (bath) of ingredients (tea, soda, wine, bleach, laundry detergent, etc.). The film is then rinsed and dried. It doesn’t seem to make a big difference if the film is shot first or soup’d; it’s probably easier to shoot first, just to lower the odds of jamming the film in the camera.

Because souped film has been treated in non-standard materials, when it’s getting developed there’s a chance that trace materials from the soup can contaminate other films in the developer. As the developer bath can be reused between films (and its more cost-efficient to do so), the developer would need to be thrown out after a souped film (else, risk damaging films days later). If you do soup film, it’s recommended that you either (a) develop at home, or (b) inform your lab you’re using souped film, so they’ll delay it until the developer is closer to end of life.

As that all seems like a lot of work and risk, I wanted to try to recreate the effect without chemically altering my film. And it occurred to me that soup film looks very similar to how highlighters look on acetate—fluid, translucent and forming organic shapes.

So, I scribbled a couple colored highlighters on a scrap of acetate. In an overabundance of caution, I placed a second piece of acetate over it, sandwiching the highlighter and preventing any possible transmission to the film. (Completely ignoring that the highlighter-side would be facing the shutter and not the film itself).

I inserted the highlighted acetate into my Diana Multi-Pinhole Operator and proceeded to take random shots while walking my dog. I think I like using the pinhole camera for these experiments because it takes away the lens and focusing as a variable (although, it did get set to 2-pinholes mid-roll).

The acetate’s slight curvature warps the buildings’ perspectives. The double pinhole shots introduce double-vision of both the subjects and the acetate within.

For a sense of completeness (and to finish off the roll), I shot an extended indoor self-portrait during my portfolio review with Michael Kirchoff. It’s interesting to compare the super sharpness of the background versus the softness of the foreground.