When I shopped for films last summer, I came acros an experimental film that is only available for a limited time by Adox. The name of the film sounded intriguing “Adox Colour Implosion”. Yeah, what do you make out of this?
Adox itself writes about the following about the film:
“Did your parents drop off a roll of film in the 70ies in a one dollar shop for cheap development and you just found it on your attic? In this case your images might look like if they were taken on color implosion. Colour implosion fears the grain of an 800 ISO film combined with the effective speed of a 100 ASA film. On top we pre-treated it so the color coupling system partially collapsed. With this grain and these light desaturated colors no one will think that you are still shooting digital.”
Wow, sounds weird and quite a bit hipster-ish. I tried anyway, got a role, left it in the fridge for a while and shot it a couple of weeks ago to catch some imploded autumn colors using the Contax RTSII, a 50mm/1.8 and a 55mm/4 macro.
My first thought when I saw the blue-magenta vase color was, am I going to be able to scan that beast? However, it scanned surprisingly well. It seems the Silverfast software can handle a wide range of base colors. I played a bit with the film profiles and ended up with Fuji NPH. I tried to set a grey point where I had one but didn’t bother too much. The colors weren’t “real” anyway and I did the final adjustment according to my liking in Lightroom.
At the time I scanned the film, I haven’t read the Adox info about the film yet. I looked at the grain and I went “Wow, this is an ISO100 film. How can that be? The grain looks more like an ISO800.” Ok, the Adox intro explains it. It’s supposed to be this way. Honestly speaking it works for me. There is a lot of grain but one could almost call it fine and subtile. The grain is also responsible for this incredible detail in the focus areas.
I’ve seen lots of images online with a yellow-greenish colorcast and really flat colors. However, I didn’t really experience any of these. For sure, the colors aren’t as saturated as a normal color film. And yes, if the reds are correct, the blue of the sky might end up wrong. I followed my personal taste and hardly modified anything in Lightroom.
Enjoy the images! Feedback is very much appreciated. There is quite a number of great photos shot on Adox Colour Implosion in this Flickr group.
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