Five Experimental Film Tricks Tested on a Zero-Dollar Budget

Experimental film photography rarely gets a fair shake because most of the ideas floating around live in old technical manuals or die in a single frustrated attempt. Testing them yourself takes time, cheap filters, and a willingness to waste a few rolls to learn something you can actually use.

Jason Kummerfeldt of grainydays runs through a handful of them in one sitting. The first experiment came out of watching "Paris, Texas" and noticing how heavily green the artificial lighting reads on film. Fluorescent light spikes hard around 547 nanometers, and certain stocks like Kodak Ektachrome and Harman Phoenix record that green in a way your eye doesn't. To recreate it, he found the Tiffen CC05G, then decided to double up cheap Wratten gel filters inside the filter rings for a stronger effect. The result works best when other colors, especially red, sit in the frame alongside the green cast.

RGB scanning gets a full test too, and it's the newest trend in film digitization. Instead of one exposure through a Bayer sensor, the process captures separate red, green, and blue passes and merges them, skipping debayering for a sharper file. Rather than spending $400, he used cheap gel filters (a Wratten 25 red, 58 green, and 47 blue) with a Leica M10 Monochrom and a Nikkor macro lens to fake it. On a color positive shot at golden hour, the process white-balanced the image mechanically and stripped out the orange he actually wanted, which is where the technique starts to reveal its limits for slide film.

The idea buried at the center of all this is that digital and film are worth blending, not choosing between. His favorite result came from taking sharp, clinical raw files off the M10 Monochrom, displaying them on a 4K screen, and rephotographing them onto Kentmere 400 pushed two stops in a Nikon F2. Greig Fraser, the cinematographer behind "Dune," has used a similar analog-out-and-back workflow to soften digital capture on feature films, so the principle scales far beyond a hobbyist desk. The takeaway is simple enough to try at home: if your digital black-and-white files feel too sterile, running them back through a film stock adds grain, a gentle glow around the highlights, and a texture that grading alone struggles to fake. It won't rescue a bad photo, but it lifts a good one.

Then things get strange. He pushes Kodak Ektachrome E100 two stops with a low-contrast filter across two trips to Reno, gets wildly overexposed frames both times, and comes away convinced E100 loses flexibility at the extremes. A Frankenstein build follows: an Industar 10 rangefinder lens, modified to M42, grafted onto a donor Nikon F2 body after filing down half a millimeter of the bayonet ring so the mirror clears. There's also a Kodak booklet trick for faking moonlight on slide film using a Wratten 47 blue filter and two stops of underexposure, tested in a Daytona cemetery for reasons that make sense in the moment.

Watch the video above to see how the moonlight fake, the RGB filter experiments, and that homemade lens actually turn out.