What Happens When You Ask a Chemist to Build Your Dream Film

Custom film built to one photographer's exact wishes, coated by hand sounds like a dream, and this version is wildly unusual. Film that behaves this way rejects almost every rule commercial stock follows, and it opens up a way of working most shooters never consider.

Ari Jaaksi breaks his summer break to share a collaboration with Igor Polyakov, a Ukrainian film enthusiast who makes his own emulsion from raw silver, gelatin, and chemicals, then rolls it onto a base as 120 film. The two have become friends, and Jaaksi describes handing Polyakov a wish list for his dream film: heavy on nuance, low on contrast, grain welcome, speed no concern. Contrast, he explains, is something he adds when printing, not something he wants baked into the negative. He also doesn't mind dust spots or blemishes, treating them as character rather than defects. Polyakov agreed to try something new for this batch, moving his emulsion onto 4x5 sheet film and wrestling with how to spread it evenly across the larger surface.

For subject matter, Jaaksi pulled inspiration from early photographs the Wright brothers made of their flying experiments, images built to document fine detail with low contrast. Lacking anything close to an airplane, he set up his Graflex Crown Graphic and photographed his favorite forks and knives from the kitchen, then borrowed plates from the same kitchen to develop the sheets. Orthochromatic film lets you develop under red light in the dark room, so you can watch the image come up instead of timing it blind, and the wide plates gave him room to observe the large sheets. Ukraine's summer heat had thrown off the emulsion's viscosity, which is why it started lifting off the base during development. Rather than scrap the results, Jaaksi leaned into the peeling as part of the look.

The technique worth pulling out here is how much control moves back to the print when the negative is deliberately soft. By asking for a low-contrast film, Jaaksi keeps every tonal decision in the dark room, where paper choice, exposure, and dodging shape the final image. He prints on Ilford 300 for one forest frame, praising its yellow-red tint and visible surface texture, and pairs different papers to different negatives on purpose. 

The missing anti-halation layer in Polyakov's film produces an effect Jaaksi builds his compositions around. Without it, bright spots can create small light leaks inside the film, so shiny metallic objects on black backgrounds sparkle in a way commercial stock suppresses. He calls the metal-on-black look almost aggressive, strong blacks against shining highlights, while the same quirk in a forest frame lets light bleed through until tree trunks nearly vanish. He knows it's technically a fault. He composes for it anyway, placing bright breaks against deep shadow to pull the full range of nuance out of the emulsion.

His framing process runs to the same level of attention. He selectively corrects dust spots while leaving the ones that belong to the film's character, trims edges that curled during washing, washes prints up to an hour with washing aids to clear any leftover fixer, signs the backs, then matches frame color and window mount to each image. A photograph, he says, isn't finished until it's printed and either framed or put into a book. Watch the video above to see the peeling sheets, the kitchen-plate development, and how both prints turn out.