Shooting With 30-year-old Film

First off hi! Oops! I haven't updated the blog in a hot minute! I won't make any excuses, I've just been real bad about keeping up with stuff in general, and the blog has taken a big mental backseat. I'd love to recount the past six months and what's new and everything but knowing myself and the way my brain works, that'll just increase my mental backlog and I'll be less likely to keep up with things here. So instead you get a half-hearted sorry and a new post today.

I first started shooting with film back in 2019. Well, technically I started in the late '90s-early '00s by borrowing and fucking around with my mom's camera, but never really did photography back then. But fast forward to a few months before the pandemic hit, and I had on a whim grabbed a used Pentax ME Super off of eBay for a decent price. I got familiar with it, shot a couple test rolls here and there, and had a good time. My parents, apparently wanting to encourage my hipster behavior, responded by gifting me my mom's old Nikon N6006 and a handful of rolls of film for my birthday the following year. Unfortunately, not too long after I got around to moving states, and the film and cameras got all packed away and never properly unboxed until over a year after I moved again and dug them out one day.

I ended up picking film back up recently, mostly thanks to the discovery that the camera store we have in walking distance from the house sells and develops film (hooray for me, sucks to be my wallet). It's taken a bit to get back into film, and I'm learning some harsh and pricey lessons in metering along the way, but I've also been having a lot of fun!

Anyway, back to those rolls of film I was gifted some years back. I pulled them out of storage too, and as I was taking inventory I noticed one I didn't recognize:

Gold Plus 100? I know Gold and ColorPlus, but not Gold Plus, and the only 100 ISO films Kodak makes that I could think of are Pro Image and Ektar. When in the world was this made?

After some research and asking the nerds on /r/AnalogCommunity, I learned that this stock is more or less the same as Kodak's current Gold line, they just dropped the "Plus" branding (and I guess the 100 ISO version?) back around the turn of the century. I couldn't for the life of me find a reliable source for when this particular roll would've been manufactured, but the general consensus was that it's probably at least 30 years old!

If you didn't know, film absolutely does have a shelf life; every roll of 35mm I've ever bought has had an expiration date about two years out from the date of purchase. How long it actually lasts can vary a lot depending on factors such as storage condition and the exact type of emulsion (black and white tends to hold up longer than color negative, which in turn lasts longer than slide film). You can keep it in good condition for longer by refrigerating it, and conversely letting it get too hot will kill it much faster. I had no idea how this particular roll had been stored for the past three decades, but was willing to bet my parents didn't have it in the freezer the whole time (and there was a half-decent chance it spent a while in the attic). So, without any reliable info, I fell back on general guidelines. That is, overexpose by one stop per ten years past expiration. There's no way of knowing exactly when it expired without the original box; assuming 30 years and fully abiding by that "rule" would mean shooting at ISO 12, which would be tough in even ideal outdoor weather. Since there was always the chance that the film was already toast anyway, I opted to strike a balance between light and the ability to actually shoot at reasonable shutter speeds. So I slapped it in the Nikon, set it to ISO 25, and went at it.

I took a couple test shots around town, and then shot the bulk of the roll while on a family trip to Nashville, TN. Definitely nothing too important since I knew I was taking a risk from the get-go. Even with mostly nice weather, I only occasionally was able to achieve shutter speeds faster than 1/60, so handheld shooting was a little rough at times, but I did my best. I made it through the roll, even got a couple extra exposures out of it, and upon returning home dropped it off at the lab, telling them I wasn't expecting much.

A week later, I picked up my negatives and a flash drive of scans and:

Yeesh, that's a little rough.

There was a massive green color shift across the entire roll, which is generally expected for long-expired film. I won't pretend that I grasp all the details, but my general understanding is that this just thanks to the red, green, and blue-sensitive emulsion layers decaying at different rates over time.

But hey, an image can still be made out, so this isn't unusable! Some basic level adjustments can prove to be a life (or at least photo) saver at times. Lightroom's auto-levels functionality didn't know what to do at all, but some manual adjustments got me something at least worthy of sharing with family/the entire internet:

The bigger issue is there's still some clear underexposure going on here, no doubt at least partly thanks to shooting 2 stops over instead of 3. Not much I can do about that, but I thankfully wasn't doing a ton of high-contrast shooting here anyway.

I picked out a small handful of other promising-looking shots and gave them the same treatment. No crazy editing on any of these, partly because all I have right now are meh-quality JPEG scans, partly because there's only so much you can do with the above as a starting point, and partly because I'm lazy and have no free time these days. With that said, here are a select few shots!

Reds still come through surprisingly well

There were also what looked like slight light leaks on quite a few frames, could be the camera or maybe just inconsistent film degradation. Not sure what caused the weird texture though, maybe the scanner?

This was by far the worst light leak I got, but it was also at/past the end of the roll, so I can't complain too much.

All in all, this was a fun little experiment, but honestly not one I'm too eager to repeat, at least not when developing and scanning costs $15/roll. Maybe if I ever learn to develop film myself it'll be more worth playing around with, but in the meantime I have enough to learn about shooting with film without throwing extra variables into the mix.