What does this to a negative?

[Too Many Cameras]

Well, I uploaded a video of the mount opening. The major findings: the highway-like structures are on the emulsion (dull) side and are pupping away from the plastic. The highway-like structures terminate before the slide's edge. The repeated pattern does not have texture. The shiny side is mostly dull, except where the tape was, and appears to have a fine crystalline layer causing the dullness. The video will be uploaded about 15 minutes after this post, and I'll leave it there because it isn't hurting anything.

At the end of the video I grab a cabochon and use it like a magnifying glass. This makes the image about 1:1 or 1:2 on the sensor.

http://youtu.be/gxzZ-rdoT6c

 

[Michael W]

[video=youtube;gxzZ-rdoT6c]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gxzZ-rdoT6c&feature=youtu.be[/video]
Your link doesn't work because it has an extra http in it. Here I've embedded your video so people can view it direct on apug. It's a fascinating pattern, really quite beautiful.

 

[Too Many Cameras]

Oops. Thank you, Michael.

I admit that I find the pattern interestingly lovely and think it does a lot for an otherwise pedestrian shot.

The yellow spots, in person, almost look like heat damage -- like someone left it in the slide projector too long.

 

[AgX]

That black pattern you refer to at the beginning of ther video is just the shadow of the cat's head resp. on its eye-sockets.

 

[AgX]

New guess:

slide mounted still wet and then directly put into projector, leading to melting of one layer.

But this still would not explain that added blue.

 

[Photo Engineer]

The slide had something get between it and the glass, and that cause both the pattern and degradation. In addition, note how dark the slide is. I would guess that the purple was once more black or at least darker and neutral and the yellow faded or was destroyed.

Very unusual. It is not a "factory" mount and thus falls back on the customer as the primary "cause". At least that is my guess now.

PE

 

[Too Many Cameras]

Thank you, everyone. I hope I don't find more negatives like this. Some of the work in this collection is quite good. Many of the slides are in these glass encasements, which seems like such a terrible idea to me. There's a lot of trapped dirt in MANY of the images. The only advantage I can see of these is that they would keep the negatives super-flat for presentations.

 

[AgX]

Such mounts once were state of the art.

 

[Chris Lange]

Extreme reticulation and contamination I would guess...but that is some trippy shit.

 

[Rafal Lukawiecki]

Thank you, everyone. I hope I don't find more negatives like this.

While I wish you success with your project, I respectfully hope that you do find a few more like this. I have found it to be captivating. If there were perhaps three such images, different yet with a similar pattern but varying in colour and subject, it would make a curious set. The interest would lie not only in the clearly present abstract value of the image, but also in the unknown history of the organic process/degradation. I have been drawn to naturally occurring abstraction, and your find is a cool example of it.

This single image made me think about the nature of permanence and the difference between perishing in the analogue vs virtual worlds: you morph in one, and in the other you just vanish.

Please post if you find another one.