have a frank conversation with the staff at your photofinisher.
the closest I've to those marks came from a light leak on a hood covering the chemical bays of a Fuji negative developer. hard to be certian.
it's also possible the printer machine had it's projector lens loose and it got bumped.....depends on the equipment ...I'm talking really old stuff here.

when dealing with odd problems with film, my system was to start with the most likely culprit....the photofinisher.

are those marks visible on the negatives?
both films from the same lab?
any other damage to the negs?

if you could get it into orbit, you could use it to fry ants in your back yard....

I'd settle for Wifii (with web function to push images to your favorite web server/site or computer), bluetooth (on both flash units and body for p-ttl, and gps tagging), color temperature controls built into the flash for matching available light, hdr function, on the dial or at least as a custom function. Enough built-in memory (4 gigs) to make memory cards optional.

No fireworks over here to try this, right now, but I wonder if anybody doing fireworks will give this a try, and share their findings?

use that multiexposure technique mentioned the other day in another thread.
set the iso to 200-400 and (try both noise reduction on and off), and 9 exposures. try manual focus and f8. try various shutterspeeds.

if you time it right you should be able to get multibursts with low noise onto a single frame...

I suspect that the wireless highspeed will work with a shoe mount flash on camera and a second shoemount flash off camera.

reason....the built in flash probably doesn't have enough power to fire the control signal, then a multiburst (stroboscopic) Highspeed pulse, in brighter conditions, that would have any effective range beyond a foot or two.

so why include it if it would only fail and frustrate the user?

I don't know much about art.....but I do know that it is often unapreciated and misunderstood. hence the phraise "(He/She) was way ahead of thier time."

I have used images similar in concept as backdrops for other images.
Take for example the flower one with the flying insect.
imagine a little girl dressed up as a fairy.

So while I would use the concept differently, only history or trends or finiky buyers will will decide if it is true art.

nice work!
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I like the image also. got me thinking about this old falla (pushing 80???I'm not sure) who peddles down to the local watering every day for a pint of draught...I suspect he lost his drivers licence years ago...but where there's a beer there's a way!).

I would pass the tripod unless you intend to do alot of night/hdr images. you can get by with a bogen super clamp and a bean bag quite easily.

there's tonnes of info on these forums regarding polarizers and ndgrad filters which I'd recommend getting.

shoot raw and jpeg...if you can't use the jpeg file, people here will help you recover a raw file....there's tutorials and everything....

I think kim c has a good point...no sense in making things too complicated.
Easiest set up would be to make a motorized filter holder, and roll a graduated nd filter across the front of the lens for experiments!