Shooting with Expired Film
5 55 Share TweetShooting with expired film is always a gamble. If you remember to expect the unexpected you’ll always be pleased. In the end, isn’t that what it’s all about?
The final rule of Lomography is perhaps the most important one, the one that free’s us from constraint and allows us to unleash our creativity. It’s emblazoned on the website and printed in bold in every book the LSI publishes. “10 › Don’t worry about any rules.”
However, there is one rule we cannot avoid. One truth we’ve all felt at one point in time and it’s this… New film is expensive. So much so that if you trawl the net or charity shops a new second hand camera can be cheaper. The LSI produce a range of good, cheaper films than what I have available to me in the shops, but to only use that limits the range of what’s possible.
I deal with this by shooting almost exclusively with expired film, and this is how I deal with it.
1. Acquiring expired film.
Here in New Zealand, we don’t have access to charity shops in the same way the rest of you might. Pretty much all our dealing in second hand anything has to be done through our own version of a certain online auction site. We’re limited. So I watch this like a hawk and when I can, get a big batch from a photographer who needs the reliability of new film or has switched to digital.
2. Film age.
I try to limit myself to film from the last decade or two, if it expired earlier than the mid 90’s it really is a gamble. So I don’t buy massive batches of that. If I come across something interesting I’ll give it a go. I’ve a Kodak T64 in the fridge for a special occasion that expired in 1980-something.
3) Looking after it.
Once purchased, I put mine straight into the fridge. I have a big enough collection for it to live in it’s own fridge. Chilling film helps keep it fresh, like food. All my film lives here, new and old. So it’s important with the expired stuff to keep it as fresh as possible. Don’t freeze it, I’ve heard you can cause reticulation this way though not experienced it.
4) Shooting with it.
The effects of expired film are many. The two we’re most concerned with are colour shift and sensitivity. As lomographers, we like weird effects, it’s why we cross-process expensive slide film! Colour shift in film is when one or more colours doesn’t resolve properly so it’s ‘subtracted’ from the perfect balance. This makes other colours stronger and causes the shift. Not a bad thing!
Expired film may be less sensitive to the light. This is the worst situation because we can’t tell how much and we don’t want underexposed negs, they mostly always just look rubbish. If you have a big batch of the same film, from the same pack and the first one is underexposed, it’s likely that all of it will be, and in that case, pretend it is a different ISO. I have some 400 speed Fuji Superia that underexposed twice. From now on I’ll shoot it at 200 to give it more light.
So that’s me signing off, before I go, please comment below on your expired film experience, let me know how you get on.
written by adam_g2000 on 2012-03-06 #gear #tutorials #film #sensia #color #expired-film #shift #tipster #asa #provia #iso #superia-colour #fuji-kodak
5 Comments