Back in September I had a free morning in Knoxville and walked around Old Gray Cemetery. Old Gray dates to the Civil War and is rare among cemeteries in that the monuments are made of marble and not granite. This allowed them to be carved easily into intricate and complex statues. This has also resulted in a lot more weathering than granite is susceptible to.
I brought a roll of Ultrafine Red Dragon film with me specifically for Old Gray. A couple of previous test rolls had led me to believe that 64 ISO gives it a nice orange-red characteristic with hints of other colors and a lot of variation in primary tonality. 64 ISO also delivered a nice exposure quality. I loaded it in my LX, mounted my 31mm FA Limited, and here are some of the results.
Red scale film, if you've never used it, is simply color film loaded so that the emulsion faces the film pressure plate instead of the shutter curtain. This causes the light to hit the anti-halation layer and then the red-sensitive layer before hitting the blue and green layers. Throwing enough light at red scale, say ISO 25, will capture red and blue tones. Throwing too little, say ISO 125 to ISO 200, will result in very dark, underexposed, and deep red images. Red scale images also tend to be slightly softer than standard color shots because the light had to pass through the anti-halation layer, a film layer designed to absorb excess light.
Red scale film is pretty easy to do at home in a dark room by pulling all the film out of roll, cutting it about an inch from the cassette, taping it on with the emulsion facing the wrong direction, and re-spooling it. If you'd like to see how that works, here's a video I did about it:
Post #2 by CreationBear
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