Upstate Film Walk 3.15.25
Last Saturday, Spartan Photo Center hosted a film walk, which they do from time to time. If you follow me on instagram, you may recall that I “found” a stash of film in my darkroom - most of which expired 20-25 years ago. This was a combination of color and black and white, in both 35mm and 120 roll film.
I’ve shot a few rolls to see how it would respond to different exposures, cameras, etc., so I thought I’d take a couple of rolls on the film walk. The “rule of thumb” for expired film is to overexpose by 1 stop for each decade expired. Given that these rolls are 20-25 years old, I’ve been overexposing by 2-2.5 stops.
Surprisingly, based on the few rolls that I’ve shot, I think the film has actually held up better than expected and the overexposure may be unnecessary. I also think it’s contributed to extra grain in some already grainy film. I’ll try exposing as-metered with the next roll and see what happens.
Anyway… back to the film walk. I took a roll of Kodak MAX 400 color film, and a roll of Kodak TMAX 400 B&W and shot them through my Contax 167MT with a Carl Zeiss 50mm f1.4 Planar lens. I shot the color roll first. I kinda like the color cast on this roll. Although, I realized a little too late that the film winder hadn’t rewound the film before I opened the camera back to change rolls. That led to some fogging of the last few exposures, but this is an experiment anyway.
Next, I loaded the TMAX 400 and we were back in business… at least until the camera died. I guess that’s what happens when you’re shooting expired film through a 35-ish year old camera. Regardless, we were out for fun and fun was had.
Here are a few shots from both rolls. I’d love to hear your thoughts and any tips you may have tried for expired film. Also - if anyone wants to help me shoot some of this film, I have about 60 rolls total, with the majority being 120 roll film. Let me know if you’re interested. I’d love to do a group project and possibly a show of the resulting prints.
