Today, and for something complete different, we’d like to feature our long time client and friend Mikel Citores. We love people that experiment with their photography, and Mikel really took it to the next level with this roll.

Velvia 50 is a classic slide film that is world-famous amongst photographers for delivering high contrast and great saturation. Historically it has been used for landscape photography, and rarely used for portraits since its high saturation tends to make subjects way too red-faced. Needless to say these characteristics appear when processed as slide film, that is using the E6 process. But what if we develop this slide film in regular C41 negative chemistry? That’s what we call cross-processing, and that’s what Mikel asked as to do with the Velvia 50 roll he sent us.

As you can tell cross-process adds a whole new dimension of colors, contrast and saturation. Most times results are quite unpredictable, but that just adds to the whole fun of it. A little over or underexposure can add a whole new layer of colors! So yeah, if you’re feeling experimental and have a roll of film that says “Process E6” that you never fond the time/courage to shoot go ahead and try it out, most likely it’ll be awesome

PS: and no, Instagram didn’t invent cross-processing. Now you know where it originally came from.

Images by Mikel Citores – http://mikelcitores.com