Having used some of this remarkable—and wildly out of date—film and seen the results, I knew this was going to be shooting everything in one day and sending the film off to the last lab in North America that processed Agfa Scala B&W Slide film.
Once removed from the refrigerator it’s a race to shoot the roll and send it off, knowing the film has already degraded with age, and is degrading rapidly as it warms—and as I shot it—so the only hope—the challenge—was to expose it and mail it, and hope some images came out like I thought they might.
I started in the morning at Jacob’s Well (note: this was before JW became a county park, so I had easy access), shot most of the roll there, then moved to the low water crossing on Haschke Road, and finished the roll on bluebonnets behind the protective wire as part of my Flowers in Prison series. (also on this site)
All in all, experience means everything, and I was able to compensate for the degradation pretty effectively and am pleased with the results. Even though some of these are repetitious, each repeat has it’s own qualities, and the repeats I left out don’t add anything to this group.
Note About Scala:
This is the only b&w slide film ever produced, and it was made for strictly magazine work so Agfa never made a paper to print it on. Almost 20 years ago, trying to print in-date Scala, Holland Photo (Austin) kept calling me to talk over prints, which they were using color slide paper for, and the paper kept showing faint color.
Maybe that in and of itself isn’t that strange, but for the fact that the color Holland was trying to keep out of the finished print was the actual color—a green shirt was faintly green, a light blue sky was faintly blue—of the object. Note how you see nothing here but shades of black to white.