Found toy camera loaded with Fujifilm 400 color film (expired). Developed in Diafine.
I’ve been logging a lot of miles on the road lately driving across the heart of Kentucky. This is the way I feel after a couple hundred miles.
This is the single best shot from a found preloaded point-and-shoot camera (est. early 1990’s) found in my late aunt’s house. She shot a few pictures of cats (she was a cat woman) laying on things that were uninteresting. So I took the camera and just kept shooting out the truck window.
I peeled off the cardboard cover (Fun Camera! Made in China!) to reveal the plastic carcass. It had black electrical tape all over it, so I removed this and did my best to reduce the sticky residue. After cracking it open in a changing bag, I found that the expired film had been wound up into a film cartridge on the right side. Evidently, when they make these disposable cameras, they load a roll in, crank it all out to the left spool where you would normally place the full cartridge. When you take a picture and advance, it actually is pulled back into the cartridge. Makes sense to me.
I then developed the film in Diafine. The orange mask is pretty thick, probably because there was no bleach step. But my Plustek OpticFilm 7500i scanner did a great job pulling something out. I used Vuescan, which is a decent program for the money, but has a confusing interface and uphill learning curve. Warning: I tried using the infrared cleaning filter with disastrous results. It must not like the dense negative. However, the multi-pass scan mode worked great to bring out faint detail.
I toyed with different effects in Photoshop until I hit upon the blue tint and defocused surroundings. When you drive a lot of miles, it seems you start to only focus on those white lines ahead of you.
Neil Kesterson's Photo Blog 