We Used Military Retired Kodak Film To Shoot Surrealistic Landscapes Of The Dolomites

This project was initially conceived as a game, an experiment. We are very lucky that we can call those mountains a second home, cause we’ve been there so many times, especially during winter, snowboarding on the best slopes in the Alps, and this summer we decided to try to look at these familiar places with different eyes.

We discovered about the existence of this film not long ago and, having seen a lot of fantastic results from great photographers, it felt obvious that it would have been the perfect choice to try to represent an unusual perspective.

Plus we discovered that this kind of film has been discontinued and is no longer in production so we wanna give it a try before it was too late. So we bought a couple of rolls (a third one was delivered just a few days too late :)) and we read everything we could find about it just to make sure to waste as few frames as possible.

So the expectations weren’t extremely high, we’ve found out on some articles that this film is quite tricky, cause it has a limited dynamic range and every time you meter you have to consider how much-infrared light might actually come through the lens.

So our main goal was to produce at least a couple of good pictures to then print and learn something about this film. In order to do so, we kept data about every shot and played a lot with different settings (filters, aperture, framing and time of the day) so that we could eventually use this technique again with much more consciousness. By the time that we got back the developed rolls we were amazed by the results and so we decide to publish them on Behance.

In the meantime, in the mountains, the actual process of shooting this film was so much fun, mainly because it allows you to capture something that you cannot actually see, and so it forces you to be more careful about your choices, making guesses, and this adds up a bit of uncertainty that for us is certainly a great part of the fun of shooting film.

We shot these two rolls during the last week of August, 2016, with two different cameras (Canon Ae1 and Olympus Om2n) with the same 50mm lens and two different filters, one yellow and one orange, that we ended up using much more.

Like I said, we are pretty familiar with the Dolomites and especially with Val di Fassa, and so for this trip we had a list of specific places that we wanted to photograph, but unfortunately we were able to visit just half of the places that we had in mind so I guess we’re gonna have to buy some other rolls and go back to continue the project :).

And after, the final steps. After coming home we sent the rolls back to the US to have them developed and scanned and so, after a couple of week, we had the results and overall we were very satisfied with the results, with a few unexpected surprises coming from the less planned and more “casual” shots. We also gained a lot of insights about this film, having collected informations about the shots. For example we discovered that much more difference, in term of the colors, depended on the two different lenses, more that the two different filters, which sometimes gave us a very similar result.

More info: behance.net