That Time When I Broke A Roll Of Lomochrome Purple In the Sprocket Rocket

That Time I Broke A Roll Of Lomochrome Purple In the Sprocket Rocket

I've always been a sucker for panoramic images, and something like the Hasselblad X-pan panoramic camera has been on my wishlist for a long time. Of course, that's way outside my budget, so back in 2022, or thereabouts, I bought the next best thing: the Lomography Sprocket Rocket. The Sprocket Rocket is a simple Lomography camera with just one shutter speed, of about 1/100s (and 'bulb'), and two apertures, one for sunny and one for cloudy weather (about f16 and f11, respectively).

Eager to try out the Sprocket Rocket, which I especially like since it has a film gate that includes the sprocket holes in the final image, I loaded it with a roll of Lomochrome Purple film. Given the 100-400 ISO latitude of Lomochrome Purple I kept the aperture mostly on the sunny setting, and set out. I took the Rocket to my favourite spots around our local Lidl supermarket, and finished the roll in the woods behind our house. 

After several exposures in the woods I came to the end of the roll. As I had another roll of film with me, I thought that I would unload the roll or Purple and load the Rocket with the second roll of, whatever it was (I can't really remember now). I started rewinding the film into the cassette and after a few turns it seemed to 'stick' in the camera. I paused for a second then turned the rewind knob gently and the film started rewinding smoothly back into the cassette again. It was a little stiff to turn, but eventually it felt like the film was back in the cassette and I opened the back of the camera. 

Oops! I could see straight away that the film had broken, and a lot of film was still wrapped around the take up spool. I quickly clipped the back onto the camera and knew that my outing for that day was over. I went home and readied my trusty dark bag. I rewound the broken film into a recyclable 35mm cassette in the dark bag and wondered what to do next. I knew that much of the film would have been exposed to light, but there might be something worth salvaging close to the take-up spool. The snag was that I don't gave any facilities to develop films at home, and at the time it was expensive to develop and scan films at the labs in Aveiro and Oliveira do Bairro. So the film went into my bedside cabinet and remained there.

A few weeks ago, I picked up a 'not passed' Epson Perfection v750 Pro flat bed scanner on the Kamerastore website. To begin with I got this running nicely on an old Windows XP computer, but just before our holidays I bought a Lenovo M600 micro computer, and I've connected this to the scanner. I've also discovered that Forever Blue in Aveiro now provides film development only for the not unreasonable price of 4€. So, after three years in a drawer, it was probably time to get the broken film developed and find out if there was anything on the film at all.

Surprisingly, there were images on the film, and after scanning with Epson Scan software I was really happy with the results. The colour shifting was quite phenomenal, although I'm sure this was a combination of effects caused by the light leaks and improper storage. Of course, I'm sure I'll never be able to produce this effect again, and although I do like light leaks, I'm not sure that I really want to try. I've posted the whole roll in an album (https://www.flickr.com/gp/147583812@N06/i92L12qxcH) on my Flickr, light leaks and all, if you want to see the rest of the images.

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#SprocketRocket, #Panorama, #Lomography, #LightLeaks, #BrokenFilm, #Experimental,  #Lomochrome, #Purple,