Shooting with Expired Film

One of the folks I often get “found film” from accidentally shipped me unused film.  Typically people will discover a partially or fully shot roll of film that has been completely forgotten inside an old camera.

Sometimes (rarely) the roll will be inside the camera without having been exposed at all.  You know you’ve messed up when you are spooling the film for the developing tank and the leading edge of the film is taped to the backing paper.   When that happens, you should roll it back up and see if you can shoot any pictures with it. Will it still work, you ask?  Well, that depends on how old it is, and how it was stored.

Color film dating back to the 70s and 80s should still produce images, but they will have strange color shifts.  With black and white, you can probably get away with film from the 60s.  It tends to get grainy in my experience. I recently shot some old Dynapam film that was probably from the 1960s (but I’m not sure).

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The camera I used was a Kodak Duaflex II:

Kodak Duaflex II

It gets pretty crisp photos with new film – you can compare on this blog post.  But with this old film, it’s an entirely different story:

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There is a point when there’s no need to bother trying…for example this film:

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And here the outcome:

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