Film Swap
Film Swap is a pretty great idea and its cool people are actively doing it. This is how film swapping works, you take a picture with your film camera and someone else across the world does the same thing. When you’re done shooting your roll of film you mail it to the other person and they mail you their roll of film. You then take their film and load it into your camera and shoot over his film. You end up with a double exposure of two different random subjects from two different countries together in one shot.
Yahsheik is a photographer in Kuwait that is film swapping and you can check out his pictures on Flickr. So far he’s swapped films with photographers in Philippines, USA, Japan and Thailand. Check out the pictures [Here]
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Jul 20, 2009
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9 Comments, add your own...
1. Patrick | July 21st, 2009 at 12:07 am
But what are the chances of getting good results? The only cool thing is being able to take shots over someones film from the other end of the globe, but that’s about it.
2. Mark | July 21st, 2009 at 12:09 am
Duh, thats the whole point!
3. Kal | July 21st, 2009 at 2:05 am
who the heck thought of that..! it’s an amazing, creative, and fascinating idea.. I took a look at Yahsheik’s photos and they were cool!
thanks for spotting the light on that area Mark ;)
4. Burhan | July 21st, 2009 at 11:28 am
So — two people shoots rolls of film. They send the undeveloped film to each other, then they load the “used” roll in their cameras and shoot again, and then the print the results.
Did I understand that correctly?
The moment you mount the “used” roll in your camera, doesn’t that completely kill the first few frames from exposure, or am I missing something really obvious here.
5. Mark | July 21st, 2009 at 11:40 am
Burhan thats correct.
Now when you mount the used roll the early frames are killed but thats always the case if you swap film or use new film. When you roll the film into your camera you wind it a few times until it gets to 0. The exposed film is located way before you get to 0.
6. cajie | July 21st, 2009 at 11:43 am
Burhan,
It would be the same for the first person who shot the original film. That’s why photographers always shoot 1 or 2 blank shots to reach the non-exposed part of the film.
But you have to also take into consideration that when the film is finished, it moves completely inside the roll – so you need a tool to pull the film out for re-shooting (or ask a lab to do it for you). Apparently, there is such a device available called a “film leader retriever”
I like the idea and will definitely check it out. The group to do the actual exchange is here.
http://www.flickr.com/groups/film_swap/
7. Yousuf | July 22nd, 2009 at 1:38 pm
siick idea!
8. ariston | July 22nd, 2009 at 3:58 pm
Wickedly awesome idea! :)
I just found out (by following the link) that most if not all of his images for film swapping are taken using lomo(graphy) camera not the typical film camera found in most stores in Kuwait.
9. yahsheik | July 23rd, 2009 at 2:10 am
Hey Mark,,Thanks a lot,,i wasn’t aware that you will blog about Film Swapping, i still have a lot of pending films in here from different countries, waiting to be process.
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