Igor Polyakov sent me a batch of his hand-poured Polyfilm this summer that came back with a shattered-glass texture running through every frame — not intentional, just what happens when hand-made emulsion meets a heatwave in his garage lab in Ukraine. If you want consistent, reliable film, buy Ilford or Kodak. If you're curious about hand-poured, unpredictable emulsion and don't mind the occasional roll like this one, his Patreon and my earlier videos on his process are linked below.

I set the roll aside. Then, on a rainy day — the kind of wet, low-contrast street light I love shooting in — the idea arrived: load the broken film into my Kodak Brownie, a box camera with no exposure control, no focusing, and no shutter speed dial, and just start shooting. Multiple exposures per frame, fired by hand against my chest, no metering, no record of how much light any given frame got.

Back home I had a roll with no consistent exposure history to work from. I developed it with stand development: a very dilute Rodinal (1:100), agitated briefly at the start and once more partway through, then left alone for over an hour. Because the developer isn't replenished by agitation, it exhausts itself fastest wherever a frame caught the most light, while the thinner areas keep building density the whole time — which is what let a roll with wildly inconsistent exposures come back printable at all.

Not everyone's cup of tea. But the unpredictability of it — the not-knowing, right up until the film came out of the tank — made this one of the most fun sessions I've had shooting film in a while.

Igor creates film: He Makes Film From Scratch — In a Garage i...
Printing Igor's film: This Film Is Still an Experiment — I Print...

Igor's Patreon: Patreon: polyfilm