I have no idea what possessed me to shoot a roll of my precious Provia 400 color negative film with a polarizer lens. For one thing, Provia 400 is a very rare film to find these days. Fuji doesn’t make it anymore and if you can find any for sale in the expired film marketplace it’s usually expensive. As you may or may not know, shooting 120 film (or any film for that matter) is a costly endeavor no matter how good of a photographer you are. Medium format film - 120 film - costs anywhere from $8 to $15 per roll, which then costs $7 - $12 to be developed plus shipping costs to the lab. This means a roll of 120 film is essentially around $20 per roll, and each photo is $2, so it’s really not a medium that you can easily “experiment” with if you aren’t on a trust fund.

But no photographer is ever satisfied with routine, and I’ve been sitting on this Provia 400 film forever, so I took a roll of to the Hoh Rainforest last March to shoot on my Fujica 690. But not content to just shoot this film straight, I decided to be a little reckless and test the film with a polarizer filter I recently bought for the Fujica. Why reckless? Well, the Fujica is a rangefinder camera, which means when you look through the viewfinder of the camera to compose and focus your shot, the image you see in the viewfinder is not “through the lens”, but through the viewfinder. So if you put a filter on the lens, you won’t see the effect of the filter in your viewfinder and with a polarizer lens this is especially risky because the polarizer is adjustable, not fixed. Basically I was leaving everything in the photo to chance except the exposure, which is kind of crazy but thankfully the results below turned out okay.

A polarizer filters out sunlight in a photo in a way that produces a lot of psychedelic effects, reminiscent of weird late 1960’s album covers. Depending on how you adjust the filter, you can have extremely high contrast images or get really flat colors that mimic an oil painting. It’s a wild filter and the results below are strictly by chance with a rangefinder camera, I made not adjustments in photoshop except for some gamma. I’m kind of jazzed by the results. It helps a lot that my subject was the magical Hoh rainforest, looking here like electric Tolkien landscapes photographed in the 1950’s.