I'm currently spending my weekend getting stomped by my Managerial Accounting class this semester. My Investments class is coming along, but surely you're not here to listen to me whine about the maths. Instead I'll just post some of the images I made in the last few weeks using crazily expired film.
My parents are estate sale raiders and they'd come across a house of an old film photographer a few months ago. They said I should come check it out and I 'bout lost my mind when I saw a shoe box of old film that'd all expired back in the late '90s and early 2000s.
I wasn't keeping up with prices at the time, but right now a 5-pack of medium format Kodak Portra 400 retails for $65.95. The estate sale guy standing guard in the old photog's room surely saw me freakin' out about the film, but still quoted me $40 for all five boxes. I'd had a birthday a few days earlier, so crazy thanks to my parents for buying me the film as a gift for being another year older.
There's plenty on the internets about how to shoot expired film. From what I'd seen and read, you're supposed to overexpose by one stop for each decade past the expiration date. This nonsense was about 25-30 years expired, so I overexposed by about two stops. Shooting handheld with a shutter speed below 125 is just asking for trouble, so by this point I was already nearly wide-open with my lens. With the faster Portra 400 I was exposing at ISO 100 but ended up around ISO 40 with some of the slower film and still around a f3.8. Don't look too close 'cause you'll see plenty of blown focus from my shots of the MLK Jr. Parade.
Turns out the developing process isn't any different – or maybe it is and I stumped Google. I do my own developing at home and only had one roll that didn't make it. Apparently the plastic used was either thinner back then or somehow becomes much more brittle over the years. That one doomed roll ended up ripping as I was loading it onto a reel, so freakin' sad day for those life-changing images never making it to this side of the process.
The day I learn to breathe underwater will come sooner than me ever learning to properly color grade an image. There's no telling how this film had been stored all these years and the image colors are all over the place. I knew it'd be a crapshoot, so in processing I intentionally didn't try and correct the colors. I'm still using my Epson V600 and SilverFast9 to scan in my film and surely one day I'll drop the $100 on Negative Lab Pro, but not today you temptress.
But still, I'm out here getting to make some images in my downtime and not paying the Kodaks of the world an arm and a leg for a roll of film.
