A TikTok photographer shot both sides of a roll of film, with otherworldly results
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Loading... - Nathan Anderson
- 25 May 2022
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With the ever-increasing price of film these days, “experimenting” sounds like a scary, money-draining concept. If your endeavor doesn’t turn out, well, the party’s over—and your wallet is a little emptier than when you started. However, one photographer is making experimentation his signature style—and TikTok is loving the crazy results.
EBS: Expose both sides
Evan Purney, who goes by @ameyecool on Instagram and TikTok, uses a technique known as EBS, or Expose Both Sides, to create otherworldly photographs. EBS is exactly what it sounds like: A photographer will shoot the roll of film on both the base and emulsion sides, producing double exposures with a Martian-red tint.
“These are basically just double exposures, so a lot of the same tips apply,” Purney explains of the method. “In general, the first image will fill the shadows of the second image. To get the look I got in a lot of my photos, I illuminated the subject with a flashlight and metered for the highlights on the ‘regular’ side. This basically turned the whole background into fairly dense shadows, which lets the red-scale image fill it in.”
Photo albums inspired a dive into analog
The Nova Scotia-based artist didn’t actually get into photography until last October when a visit to his parents surfaced some old photo albums.
“I realized how much I enjoyed revisiting old memories and hearing the stories behind them,” he recalls. “I found I never looked back on my phone pictures and would lose them whenever I got a new phone.”
Though new to photography, Purney dove right into film—he has yet to own a digital camera but says that will come along eventually.
“I went with film because the unpredictability and the candidness are really fun for me—I feel I try really hard to get ‘perfect’ photos when I can take a bunch with instant feedback [using a smartphone]. There was definitely a strong element of nostalgia [in choosing film] as well,” he writes to PopPhoto.
Nothing is too wild
Purney has also experimented with film soup, low-res digital photography (a Nintendo DSi and a Game Boy Camera are the tools of choice), re-loading disposable cameras, low-speed films, and a 1950s camera. But it was his interest in shooting double exposures that lead to his discovery of the EBS technique and the first roll. Read More...
