Tag: found film

  • Found Film Twofer: At the Beach and On the Farm

    Not long ago, I bought a roll of Kodak Verichrome Pan 127 film that had been found inside an old Beacon II, a bakelite camera manufactured between 1947 and 1955 by Whitehouse Products in Brooklyn.  The seller threw in half a roll of black and white 35mm film – which he thought might have come…

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  • Found Film Friday: Fungus

    It’s “Found Film Friday!”  This week’s roll is a bit different from most weeks.  This week’s roll seems to have been stored in conditions that allowed some sort of mildew or fungus to grow on the  film.  This was not obvious in the development process, but when you look at the scanned photos, you can…

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  • A Story Behind Every Picture

    They say every picture is worth 1,000 words.   In the best case, a good picture tells a story.  Sometimes the picture itself is the story.  This is one of the cool things about photography. Take the photo below, for instance.  Not a very good picture – out of focus, not well-framed, and the subject…

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  • Found Film Friday: Clyde, Texas

    In my continuing, admittedly odd, quest to rescue other peoples’ forgotten, undeveloped film from oblivion, I recently acquired a Kodak Brownie Starflash, advertised on eBay as still containing a roll of unprocessed film inside.  I received the camera, still in its original box. It was manufactured between 1957 and 1965. You get a lot of…

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  • Found Film Friday: Trip to Germany

    This week’s “found film” is a roll of 35mm film that came with 5 other rolls via an eBay seller who was unwilling or unable to offer any details concerning the film’s origin.  Only one of the six rolls yielded any images at all, and they all had an orange tint to them and had…

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  • Found Film Friday: Bill

    Found Film Friday is when we look at a roll of film that someone took long ago, and forgot to get processed/developed, and years later it ended up in my possession so that I could rescue the photos from oblivion. Over the last two weeks we have gotten to know Bill.  Two weeks ago, I…

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  • Found Film Friday: Bill’s Party

    Last week I posted the first of three rolls that were shipped to me as a set, ultimately from Rhode Island – and we don’t know much else about them.  They were all 120 film, but of different types.  This second roll was marked “Bill’s Part”…and after developing them, I realized it was supposed to…

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  • Found Film Friday: Bill Goes to a Wedding

    So there’s this guy, “Bill”, who loved to take pictures…he lived somewhere around Rhode Island…and when he passed away, as is the case for many people, his things were packed up and sold for whatever his relatives could get for them.  Among those things were many, many rolls of undeveloped film, some of which ended…

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  • Found Film Friday: Holy Toledo! It’s an Ansco Anscoflex!

    This week’s Found Film Friday is a fun find… This week’s film is a roll of Kodak Verichrome Pan 620 film.  I was the winning bidder on eBay, and asked the seller where the film had come from.  He told me he was selling the camera separately, so I bought that as well.  It’s an…

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  • “Found Film Friday”: from Fort Wayne, Indiana

    This blog bounces around a bit depending on what I’m interested in on a particular day of the week, so maybe I will post “found film” articles on Fridays from now on.  There are a few folks out there doing “52 film cameras in 52 weeks”, which could be fun (I’d probably be up to…

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  • Improvising a Lightbox to View Dark Negatives (Found Film)

    This is probably not a problem that comes up too often,  But the good news: I have a solution! What can you do when your negatives are so dark, your scanner can’t “see” any image?  This happened to me the other day – I had developed a roll of “found film” and could see there…

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  • Found Film: Singing Family

    Here’s another “found film” set – one of a number of rolls of vintage film that have been discovered inside cameras, attics or elsewhere – that have made their way to me to be rescued from oblivion.  This is the latest roll: This roll supposedly originated in South Carolina, but we have a clue that…

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  • Found Film: “Backyard Family” and “My Puppy”

    In a continuing series in which I share photos I get from old rolls of film that turn up out there, whose original owners forgot to ever develop them… Here are a couple of rolls where I barely got anything whatsoever, but you can still make out just a bit of detail. The first is…

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  • Found Film: Trip to Vegas

    The latest batch of “found film” comes from Belleville, Illinois.  This roll was one of those 126 cartridges they used to put in Kodak Instamatics – in this case a Kodak Instamatic 15F, where the film still resided when I got it: Judging from the cars in the photos, the film is not all that…

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  • Found Film: 110 “Pocket Instamatic”

    One of those small 110 cartridges people used to put in “pocket instamatic” and other miniature cameras in the 1970s and 1980s came into my possession the other day.  All twelve pictures had been taken.  No idea whose it was originally – it was probably found in an old camera picked up at a garage…

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  • More Found Film

    I posted yesterday about “found film” – exposed film found in old cameras.  If you’re also intrigued and interested in seeing other “found film,” you can check out the following websites: – Westfordcomp.com – a no-frills website listing “found film” – along with bunches of snarky comments – Nerd’s World – a growing collection of…

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  • Six-16 Brownie Special with Found Film?

    I’ve mentioned it before, and I still can’t tell you why:  I like taking old rolls of film I come across, and getting them developed to see what secrets they hold.  It costs much more than modern film, and probably half the time there are no pictures to be salvaged.  People think it’s weird –…

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  • Found film: Cowboy Outfit – Yellowstone!

    One more installment in the “found film” series. This series of photos came to us via eBay from an unknown camera. The first and fourth photos feature a little girl – one posing in a cowboy (-girl) outfit, and the other is from what looks like a camping trip perhaps. They appear to be from…

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  • Found Film: Day at the Beach

    The latest photos in my “found film” series is a set of four 6 x 6 cm photos from an unknown camera. These show a family trip to the beach – possibly but not necessarily memorable – but they won’t be remembering them from the photos they took that day, because they never saw their…

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  • Found Film: Gone Fishing

    I’ve published a few posts recently about “found film” – old rolls of film that pop up from time to time, of unknown age and origin.  This set of photos seems to be from a family fishing trip  They are all 6 x 6 cm negatives on 120 film, which means there would have been…

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  • Found Film: Check out my Hat

    Here’s a fun thing to do.  Well, I think it’s fun.  Most people I talk to just give me an odd look when I tell them about “found film”. Occasionally on eBay you’ll see a listing for “exposed film” from an unknown age and camera.  Or, like what happened to me, you’ll find a roll…

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  • Found Film: the Fun Begins

    So in all of this business of acquiring really old cameras, here’s something I recently learned.  There are lots of old cameras lying around in peoples’ attics that still have film in them.  And frequently they end up on eBay or in collectible shops, without anyone checking if there is still film inside.  This happened…

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  • Found memories…and a lost roll of film

    Here’s a fun mystery to try and solve. For my (recent) birthday, my kids went down to Otto’s, the local “junk and curiosities” dealer and picked out for me the newest additions to my growing vintage camera collection.  In addition, my youngest was excited to have found an original box for the Agfa Billy Compur…

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