I Love Peelings!

I was lying on the sofa watching my favourite teleshopping channel (the legendary Dr. Schulz from dermTV) when the tickling of the peeling mask in my face reminded me of the mission doc had assigned to me: to find out about the peelability properties of PX Silver Shade film, cause as we all know by now, peeling can not only prevent your images from being attacked by the evil killer-christl but also is a starting point for all kinds of eggziting analog artwork.

How does this peeling
Work?

The main obstacle in the task of seperating the layers of an integral picture is the so-called mask, the white layer around and on bottom of your PX pic, that wraps around the image and glues the whole compendium of layers together.

To overcome this obstacle, you simply turn the developed image around and open the seal where the mask is glued to the negative part on the backside of the image (a sharp knife will help)

fig 1. separate the mask from the back layer (LLP will help)	fig 2. simply cut on top

As soon you loosened the lamination (pun intended) of the mask, you simply pull the backlayer and the frontlayer apart

fig 3. pull apart the layers	fig 4. pull gently but determinately

...BUT

What Eggzactly are you
Peeling here?

Since I myself was relatively new to peeling and the internals of an integral pictures before, I think it can't hurt to give a bit of background information to those of you who (like me) only ever peeled bananas and the skin on your cheeks in the past.

Even though an integral pic really contains 983 layers, there are only 4 layers relevant in terms of peeling: negative, dried emulsion, piclayer, mylar (the transparent window on top of the pic)

When I started to play around with peeling, I quickly discovered that there are basically 3 ways an integral image can be disintegrated, and where the 4 relevant layers can end up:

Which one of the 4 you're gonna get where is not totally up to you - according to my discoveries it depends on the time passed between shot and peeling, the temperature .. and most probably also moonphase. Zeriously, the key is the state of the emulsion layer - if it's not dry enuff yet, it tears apart and parts of it stay on the negative side, some on the mylar side, if its too dry it tends t stick to the image/mylar layer.
Now my first eggziting discovery when peeling PX600 was that if you separate the layers quickly enuff after development of the pic (first 10 minutes after shot),

No problem, just get rid of the mask and separate the negative from the mylar with the pic and the white emulsion layer. My second eggziting discovery was that (cause I peeled method 2 for the first time) that

(see lower part of figure 6 above and you will be able to understand my eggzitment).

Read On About Freezy-Peasy Here

Discovering the

Freezy-Peasy Way!

Red/Brownisation of PX 600?

Now that I found out how much the PX600 accomodates us to fight the evil killer-christl by his high peelability, I wanted to find out if the peeling can also fight the annoying fact that PX film turns rather brownish when shot in warm temperature. It happened to be a rather hot day (over 30° celsius) when I did my eggsperiments and even when peeling a picture super quickly after shot, with this high temperature, the image turned brown immediately.

So my first idea was to develop the picture in the fridge, but I have to admit that I didn't have much suxxess with this - the pictures turned brown even if I ran the 5 meters from the couch in my livingroom (where I took them) to the fridge in the kitchen. After having wasted a couple of minutes trying to move the fridge to the livingroom, smart boy that I am, I moved the couch to the kitchen immediately next to the fridge. But even with this setup I had not much suxxess, even if I put the pic into the fridge a couple of seconds after the shot, the evil brownisation occurred. So (smart boy that I am) I figured that the temperature of the chemicals in the moment of exposure would be the crucial point, so my next attempt was to put the whole filmpack into the fridge for a couple of hours before taking the shot. To make a sad story short, also this approach didn't help much, the pictures still became brown faster than I could turn them around and fetch the knife.. with the additional disadvantage that these pre-cooled pictures were almost impossible to peel - the developing layer always tore apart when seperating mylar from negative - probably some kind of condensation phenomenon (see fig. 9) ..and the pictures were still brown! .. almost as much as my popo, that I wanted to bite in utmost frustration!

fig. 9

broken emulsion layer

But I was possessed with ambition - there simply had to be some way to avoid the brownisation! So if the fridge didn't help, the next logical step was the freezer.
I put anotha pack of PX600 into the freezer for 10 minutes and took the first shot.. the result was rather underwhelming (see upper left of fig. 10), so I put the SLR680 back into the fridge for anotha 10 minutes (didnt wanna loose a pic by taking the film out of the camera). The next shot looked promising, so I repeated the procedure a couple of times, till the electronics of the camera gave up the ghost cause of acute hypothermia (and the chemicals in the pic refused to do their work - see lower right of fig.10)

fig. 10

pictures taken with progressively frozen film
(lower right, development severely handicapped - encouraged by
means of a lighter in the area around the eyes)

I had finished the packs of PX600 I had taken home and was quite happy with the results:
I had found out that PX600 can easily be peeled to prevent the christl - and that the brownisation can be controlled by development in the freezer*
(*note for the sceptic ones: the effect is permanent - I had put the pix into the backoven for over an hour in the hope that they would peel more easily - levels of sepiasation did not change anymore)

More Fun

With the freezer!

A few hours later my wife came home. Now finally having a decent model (everybody who knows me, knows that I hate shooting my ugly face) I was eager to continue the freezer research with PX100 film.
This time I didn't pre-cool the filmpack, but tried to get the picture into the freezer as fast as possible after it had been ejected from the camera (thankgod the couch was still in the kitchen).
Everybody who has ever watched PX Silver Shade develop, knows the wondaful special effects a pic passes through during the process of development, the blue opacification dye (called "Gardinenfarbstoff") slowly vanishing, various otha colors appearing and vanishing again, the phases of solarisation when parts of the image look like inverted... quite a spectacular show. Now I was fascinated by the idea of being able to capture parts of this by slowing down the development process in the freezer and then quickly peeling the image in a state before it was fully developed.
With a bit of practice I managed to seperate the layers even before the Gardinenfarbstoff had vanished (see upper part of fig. 11)

fig. 11

developed in freezer and peeled early

The results were fascinating documents of frozen stages of development - and they were even stable (pics in fig.12 scanned 24 hours after separation) - what supercool fun!

Now having tasted the joy of freeze-peeling, I became even more adventurous. I was fascinated by the potential which the combination of slowed down development and peeling early offered and wanted to test out its limits (since the wife suffered from pneumonia due to the long time in the freezer the evening before, I had to revert to my previous model - my favourite one, as everybody who knows me knows) I played around with cutting the frozen negative, mixing layers of different filmtypes and all kind of otha groovy things that came to my playful mind.

See below for some results of my experimental rush..

fig. 13

shape of glasses cut from the negative and put back onto pic to
prolong development in this area

fig. 14

hybrid develoment - PX 100 image layer on (unexposed) TZ Artistic
negative and vice versa

fig. 15

"hybrid double exposure" - mixing image and negative layers of a
freshly exposed PX 100 and freshly exposed Spectra picture

I don't wanna go into much details about these stunts, let me just tell you that I had a huge lot of fun! So roll up your sleeves, move the couch near the freezer and start having fun too! Sometimes PX Silver Shade film might appear to be a pain in the youknowwhere, but in facts its potential to have fun and live your adventurous spirit out is enormous!

Don't throw away your PX images that you consider failures too hastily - by peeling the pic and getting access to the backside of the emulsion layer, you get a second chance to produce breathtaking art! "Draw" on the pic by scratching the emulsion or beautify your pic by applying color to the back of the emulsion..

Also emulsion lift/transfer works like a charm with PX Silver Shade. Read all the details about manipulation techniques

Here

Yours truly,