🏳️‍⚧️ photography and weird tech projects

seattle, wa


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in reply to @alyx's post:

I’m always impressed by people who achieve decent results from experimentation with expired or otherwise discontinued products, on top of acquiring them in the first place! Aside from the pride in successfully utilizing 77 year old film, are there any specific advantages to shooting with this foregone batch of 135 should you have anymore?

It's just fun, really! Unless it's some kind of specialty film like Aerochrome or the like, there's absolutely no good reason to ever go buy weird old film. For old color processes you can't even get chemicals so you're stuck cross processing, if it's even possible with the type of film you have (though you can develop pretty much anything as black and white!) or getting a bunch and trying to concoct an approximation of the intended developer. With black and white, you'll usually get really bad (if not overwhelming) base fog you have to correct for when scanning, which absolutely nukes the dynamic range. A while back I was shooting some Dupont film they made for the Bell System back in the 60s, and it was so far gone you couldn't even make out frames without shining light directly at it.

The sensitivity of films degrade over time as well, so you're limited in what sorts of subjects you can shoot. It either has to be in broad daylight with a fast lens or having a tripod with unreasonably long exposures.

I suppose it could be good for some kind of art if lo-fi analog photos are something you're into.

Thank you for the insightful and detailed response!

The oldest film I’ve used is Ilford HP5+ which expired in 1999. It produced feasible images despite being shot with a Holga in unideal conditions. Someone gave me exposed Agfachrome CT18 reversal film that I need to develop, but the fear of potentially ruining those frames of history is daunting.

Do you ever plan to use these eccentric films in a way that their specialty or age supplements?

If you care about getting colors out of the Agfachrome, that's going to be a challenge for sure! It looks like that developer was discontinued almost 40 years ago. It sounds like people have had mixed results with homebrew developer for it.

That said, if you just want images out of it, you can get black and white images from it with a high probability of success just throwing it in Rodinal. Usually stand developing works well, but with really old films I'd stick to normal development in 1:25 or so with regular agitation. I've noticed specifically on my Dupont Bell film that it's extremely susceptible to bromide drag when stand developed.

I don't really have any solid plans for any of it, so far it's just been mostly benchmarking it to see where it stands in terms of usability. I went out to the local telelphone museum (and former Bell central office) and shot a couple of rolls of the old film Dupont made for Bell in another post. It was cool going there and taking photos on film that was made to take pictures there.

https://cohost.org/alyx/post/1112506-more-57-year-expired