This shot above is a pleasant surprise - a gift from a year back - that I discovered when I opened up the roll-film back of my Polaroid 600SE and saw that there was this just-finished roll of Kodak 400VC* just waiting to be extracted. Since I am not the meticulous note-taking type of photographer I had no idea what it was.

So I developed it along with an incongruous bit of 35mm (that turned out pretty awful) and realized that it was a series I had taken during last year's Vancouver Folk Music Festival. That was back when I liked to attract attention by shooting using the "G00SE" and other funky cameras in public.

For a day last year I walked around with the 600SE and took portraits and other things. It was a very nice time and unlike this year there was no rain.

I fully intended to bring out the 600SE again for my friend's impromptu portrait session last week but deferred to my more proven Mamiya 645 kit + digital. This roll I put in a drawer for development later.

So it was actually quite glorious when I saw this weirdo shot. If you examine the shot you can see obviously that it was overlapped multiple times. There are at least three exposures overlapping each other (maybe even four) that were most probably the result of some bad transport.

The Mamiya Universal film backs have an annoying habit of allowing you to do multiple exposures rather easily. Unlike any of my other rollfilm cameras it doesn't stop you from reshooting the same frame. At the same time, the lever that forwards the film is, how to put it, rather arbitrary. You have to really pay attention to the your action or you might end up not advancing far enough.

The result is as you see it. Somehow I managed to advance it only partially for three frames. But seeing it, I love it a lot. I want to do this on purpose.

Goodbye 400VC

*Of course they don't make Kodak 400VC any more. This was probably the last of a bag of 400VC that was the very first 120 film I got on eBay. There was at least 30 rolls that I worked my way through. Alas, farewell 400VC. 400VC has now been replaced by Kodak Portra. No "VC".