I visited the city of Helsinki and took some pictures around the Haltiala Farm, which is located in the city itself. The farm is owned by the city and is more of a tourist attraction than a “proper” farm. It is a very nice-looking place and I had hoped that I could get some nice pictures from there, but when I got my film developed, there was an issue with it. The developing machine broke, and my film rolls were overdeveloped. Two of my rolls were affected, one was Kodak Ultramax 400 and the other was Fujifilm 200 film. The Ultramax was very badly overdeveloped, but the Fujifilm suffered less. Here is my attempt at salvaging some images from the film. In this post, I will show what I managed to do with the Ultramax film. In (probably 2) other posts I will show what I did with the less damaged Fujifilm film.

The lab gave me free scans (and development) because of the broken machine. I usually do my own scans but here the lab scan is helpful in seeing what I’m trying to fix. Below is one of the lab scans. As you can see, everything has a very blue cast, the constrast is pretty high, and the grain is very large and visible. There are also other markings on the film (more visible in the second image).

One issue is that I have never used Ultramax before, so I did not have a refrence on how the images should actually look. I did still try to see if I could remove the color cast and fix the other issues. The only way I managed to do it was by desaturing the colors and messing with the sliders and curves. The end results are still pretty bad as the colors are messed up and the images are very grainy.

Here is how the lab managed to scan this image.

And here is my own scan and edit.

The rest of the images are some of the ones I managed to fix up a bit. Some pictures I would have wanted to show were too damaged to get even a bit fixed. I also took some phone pictures from the Haltiala farms, which I will show at the end.

During my visit I took pictures with my phone because I wanted to send a few images from the place to other people immediately. I will show a few of those here so you can get an idea of how the place actually looked like.