Road trips can be awesome. As it so happens, once upon a time I was on a road trip from Las Vegas, through Death Valley up towards Lake Tahoe and then San Francisco. It was the path a colleague and myself took to get from a conference in Las Vegas to some meetings with folks from one of the other offices. The trip took us roughly a weekend and my colleague suggested stopping at Mono Lake to wander around and take some pictures.

The lake has some photogenic features and I took some pictures on my smartphone and filled a roll of Fuji NPS 160 with a Hasselblad 503cx. The camera worked fine and I had the 10 frames filled quickly with various rock formations and vegetation. I love using cameras with big mirrors because of the satisfying “thunk” you get when pressing the shutter.

Everything went smoothly. The roll used is a colour film. Why are the five frames in black and white? Well, development did not go as planned. I put two rolls on the same spindle. That would not be a problem, as you are supposed to put two rolls on the same spindle. Somehow I managed to put both rolls on top of each other, so that they were stuck together. That way, not enough chemicals got to the emulsion and the images came out muted and with a strong colour cast towards blue.

At the time, I could not figure out how to rescue those pictures. I gave up on them and forgot about it until the time came to write this blog entry. Like with the other posts so far, I dug through my archives to see which images might have been taken with the Hassi. The only colour images, so far, are those where I failed during development. I started a last attempt to correct the colour cast with the help of the hue, saturation and lightness sliders in DxO PhotoLab. It did not work.

Then an idea crept out of the depths of my conscious: What about turning those images black and white? I tried some black and white film presets from the DxO FilmPack, settled for Rollei Retro 80s and adjusted exposure. Voilà! I got something usable!