I was attracted to going back to film photography and my main impetus was the availability of pre-exposed or prepared films that introduce colour shifts or special effects onto the film. There is a large range of these types of films, each having different effects. I thought that they would be good to experiment with and that I could use the images from these films as a metaphor for the dangers of manipulating nature or the environment. One of the attractions (to me) of using this type of film is that the results are unpredictable, the changes have already been made to the film before you load it into the camera. You could, perhaps, achieve a similar effect using a digital image and Photoshop, but the result would be intentional, deliberate and would probably appear so. The random nature of this technique adds an element of surrealism to the resulting image which can be rather dreamlike. There are several producers of such films, including Lomochrome, Revolog, Kono, Dubblefilm and Washi. I obtained a selection of films to experiment with.
As well as trying out new films, I also experimented with a panoramic camera. This was a cheap, plastic camera with a fixed shutter speed and just two settings – Cloudy and Sunny! It produced panoramic pictures that were twice the width of a normal 35mm image. An additional feature was its removable mask which meant that you could either expose the film in the traditional way or remove the mask and expose the whole film including the area around the sprocket holes. This seemed attractive as it makes it very clear that the image was made from a film camera.
I also used cross processing and multiple images on some of the photographs to get heightened effect, again using the metaphor of the artificial affecting the natural.