2017, Roll 12 – Roger Remjet!

I took part in the @EMULSIVEsanta gift exchange last year and was paired with a very generous guy in the States. Among the bundle of gifts that he sent over, were 4 hand-rolled canisters of Fuji Eterna 160 tungsten corrected cinefilm.

I finally got around to shooting the first of it in late March. The note in the box said C-41 and so I assumed that it was processed in the usual way. I sent the roll to my lab of choice (FilmDev.co.uk) and got a call from them the next day. It seems that films made for moving pictures, such as this, are coated with a material called Remjet that somehow absorbs stray light. This black layer needs to be removed as part of the processing, usually beforehand, so as not to pollute the chemicals. This was new to them and something that they weren’t set up to handle.

The lab were happy to run it through their process anyway and sent the film back, still (mostly) covered in Remjet. A little Twitter research (thanks to @timdobbsphotography and @dizd) and I found that it could be removed with soda crystals and a bit of wiping.

Sure enough, I gave it a quick soak and the gunk wiped straight off, albeit with a few scratches and marks that you’ll see when we get to the pictures.
This did of course mean that I was going to have to do the scanning. I still hate it, especially colour scanning and doubly-especially when its tungsten/cross-processed and I don’t know how the colours should look.

Anyway, here are the pictures, all taken on the same day on a walk by the river and then through Leicester with E and G.

---

Gubbins:

Leica M6, 35mm Summicron-M ASPH, Fuji Eterna 160T, processed by FilmDev, remjet removed using 4 t-spoons of soda crystals in 1l of warm water and a wet micropibre cloth, scanned at home (Grrr).