Wrecking Film - Reticulation

     Wrecking film seemed like fun at first for me; scratching it, purposely developing it wrong, etc. I was honestly excited to wreck my film! And yes I know that sounds a little bad. For my photographs, I went into the local grave yard and took photographs of tombstones. The wrecking film effect that I was going to try was reticulation, which is 'the formation of a network of cracks or wrinkles in a photographic emulsion'. Or, in other words, I make the emulsion of my film crack during developing.

     What you have to do to get reticulation is heat up the film, and then flash "freeze" it all while the film is developing. What I did was bathe my film in hot water for a few minutes to expand my film, develop the film normally, then I put 5 ice cubes in the container to make ice cold stop, fix, and rinse to make the film cool down rapidly and shrink, which should make the film crack.


     When I finished rinsing my film, and I was able to look at it under light, I saw disappointingly that I was not successful in getting reticulation. So I went to plan B; scan my film, then scratch the hell out of it by stepping on it in gravel. Now, I'm very glad I scanned my film before I went and stepped on it because I didn't realize how much of the photograph I was actually going to scratch of; let's just say I was dying inside as I was stepping on it, and saw it afterward.

Here are some samples of what reticulation is supposed to look like.

 Notice how all the photographs have a "pattern" of cracks? That's reticulation.