Alright, I feel like telling an actual story today. Let's dive into one of my most hilariously cursed film experiments yet.
I've bitched ad nauseam about the rising costs and scarcity of film and how shooting new and fresh stuff feels basically unsustainable these days, and how this has driven me to buying basically any film I can get my hands on regardless of age or pedigree if it's cheap enough. I got into bulk rolling last year so that I had the flexibility of buying spools of old garbage film too. You can see where this is going.
A pretty bad listing for a bunch of bulk 35mm with not much of a description came up on ebay for a pretty low price. So naturally I jumped on it. When the package first arrived on my doorstep, I assumed I had been shipped the wrong item on accident. Upon opening it, I was greeted to the sight of multiple boxes of 8x10 and 5x7 film, not the 35mm I had ordered. However, I dug deeper into the box, and there it was. All in all, 1800 feet of Kodak Spectroscopic film of various types spread across five rolls. All too large to fit in a standard bulk loader (we'll get back to that in a second). The "spectroscopic" bit means that it's been sensitized to different wavelengths of light, which is why there were a few different types. Originally it was supposed to be intended for astrophotography. Which added some explanation as to why one of the boxes, the Type 103a-G, had the words "Not for Sac Peak" scrawled on it. "Sac Peak" upon further research is a clear reference to the observatory located at Sacramento Peak.
What about that mystery large format film that was also in the box? I took a closer look at what the film itself was. There were a few types of film that would have been common for the era, but one really stood out. Shellburst film isn't something I had come across before. I did some more digging. Turns out it's a type of film explicitly used for capturing the flight/explosions of aerial munitions. It has "special characteristics for photographing objects against a bright sky" as one forum user put it. Ok, let's dig in more. I don't even usually look at the return address on stuff I buy on ebay, but this one got me curious enough. Sure enough, Alamogordo, New Mexico.
This stuff came from White Sands.
I took another look at the ebay seller's account. Best I can tell, they were an estate sale flipper. No consistency at all to the things they sold. Definitely no more weird film, unfortunately. My best theory is that this stuff spent most of its life in a freezer in a government building (some of the weird stains on the outside of the boxes lend some credibility to that theory) and eventually when they were getting rid of all the remaining film decades later, some guy just cleaned out the freezer and took it home, and probably died and it got picked up by the estate sale flipper. They probably only saw the 35mm as valuable, and effectively just used the large format stuff as packing material because it was convenient.
Ok, mystery somewhat solved. We still gotta figure out how to shoot the stuff. First order of business: 35mm bulk loaders are designed to take 100 foot rolls of film. The rolls I had ranged between 200-500 feet. No bueno. Thankfully this is a problem that someone had already solved (https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4868217) so it was just a matter of printing the thing and using it. Living in the future is hell, but sometimes 3D printing can be kind of handy. So off I went into my darkroom (bathroom) and set the whole mess up on my desk (back of my toilet), and succeeded in peeling off a shorter roll out of one of the rolls of Type 103D. Oops, it was backwards. I guess I should have paid attention to that "Emulsion side out" note on the box. Ok, one more time. Alright, now we're ready to load some cans.
In my research, I had come across someone who had actually used the stuff somewhat recently themselves, so I thankfully wasn't completely blazing a trail from scratch here. I had some suggested starting points for film speed and development time. And the most important note of all, the stuff apparently really doesn't like to be developed at normal temps, and the emulsion will fall off. So I had to reduce the temperature of the chemicals and increase the dev time accordingly. Through a good bit of trial and error, a friend and I blasted through enough test shots to get a comfortable sweet spot of effective ISO and developing strategy.
I was finally comfortable enough to load up a whole roll of the stuff and take it out into the wild. Which leads us to this photo. I felt like a bit less of a shit than usual walking around at a local car event with a film camera while knowing it was loaded with unquestionably the weirdest film anyone there had ever seen. The results... I actually really like. No antihalation layer means that the stuff has a really nice glow. It's grainy as hell, but not in a distinctly bad way (open the image in a new tab if you wanna judge, I've learned that cohost kinda shits on film photos unless you explicitly open the whole image). It's just fast enough to be able to shoot perfectly fine handheld outdoors. And the specific light sensitivity definitely gives it a unique character.
I've still got a really absurd amount of this stuff left. My cursed film experiments kinda slowed down towards the end of last year after I bought a house and it took me a while to get my real darkroom (no longer a bathroom!) set up, but now I'm excited to dive headfirst into this stuff again. Ask me nicely and I might even roll you a can or two.
Cheers.
