Dan Matthews

Redscale - Harman Red 125

I recently shot my first roll of Redscale film: Harman Red 125

For those (like myself) unware of what Redscale photography is, its a practice of taking a colour film and reversing it so that the light passes through in the opposite direction then it normally would. This changes the bias towards reds and away from blues as the different layers of the film emulsion get a greater or lesser amount of light than normal. Thankfully Harman have made this easier to try by pre-rolling their Phoenix 200 film in reverse to give a second out-of-the-box Redscale option on top of the Lomography offering.

Within the larger niche of film, Redscale if a very much smaller sub-niche. Within that sub-niche, the number of people shooting art-nude is tiny. I had only found handful of reference images ahead of the shoot. Based on knowing it had a low latitude and favoured a little over exposure, I rated at 100iso and had it developed at the 125iso box speed.

As a lover of an alternative and original look, I've been very pleased with the outcomes. The Redscale offering a nice halfway between a colour and a monochrome image. In a few cases the strong directional lighting gave me some issues (the shoot was a dark room with direct and filtered sunlight through a window) but generally it exposed well of the camera meter.

It's worth noting that the images do not hold up well to editing, in almost all cases a crop is about as far as I've gone, as any attempted to tweak levels or other factors lead to some odd artifacting. However, personally I don't mind this limitation, and there is something to be said for accepting what the film gives, rather than trying to overly force a look in post production.

Would I shoot it again? 100% yes. Already 2 more rolls sit in my fridge due to its limited edition nature. Another sits in my roaming camera, being tested in day-to-day images. For my next model-centric shoot, studio light will be my objective.