A Film Soup Travel Session in Italy by Arantxa Barbarin González

Today, we’re featuring a gorgeous set of film soup images from Arantxa Barbarin González. Arantxa’s dreamy, soft pink film soup effects are a perfect pairing with her stunning travel images of Italy.

Scroll down to see all of the images, and here are a few words from Arantxa about her experience with film soup. If you want to learn more about film soup and how to do it for yourself, check out this article here on Shoot It With Film!

I first discovered the concept of film soaking and film soup through the work of Iosune de Goñi (@iosunedegoni). The idea of purposely damaging my own rolls of film seemed strange, but having seen the unique effects and patterns that people were getting with their soups I decided to give it a go.

I grabbed an old Olympus OM-10 that had been sitting in my room for years and shot three rolls during my trip to Italy. The first thing I did when I came back was soak them in a concoction of boiling water, hand soap, and lemon juice and let them dry for about two weeks.

I found out that most film labs do not want to develop rolls that have been soaked since it can ruin their chemicals and damage other people’s films, so eventually I bought my own color developing kit to do it myself. Given that it was my first time shooting film, trying film soup and developing at home, it sounded like a recipe for disaster. (Read all about how to develop color film at home here on Shoot It With Film.)

However, the results were incredible. Since then, I have experimented with red wine, tea, energy drinks and even chucked a roll into my washing machine. What I love about film soaking is that there are no rules: you can soak it before or after shooting in any kind of liquid, and you will always get different effects that cannot be duplicated even if you use the same soup and timing every time.

Analog cameras and films used: Olympus OM10 (Find at KEH Camera or eBay) |Kodak Colorplus 200 (Find on Amazon) | Self developed

Connect with Arantxa: Instagram

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