Colour film well out of date.

The friend that gave me the out of date colour film did so in part for the removal of a partly exposed roll of film from her Dads camera a week or so earlier. She was not sure if it had become stuck or not.

The camera was an Olympus OM707. The battery carrier lid was broken and held in place with sticky tape and not working. The batteries were flat, so I tried some new ones but there was still no life which is a shame as it was in good order otherwise and had been in regular use up until eight years earlier. I had not come across this camera before so was not sure if I would be able to unwind the film manually. I found a re-wind button on the base plate, pressed it and went into the darkroom and opened the back. I took the cassette out first then gently pulled on the film and to my surprise it started to unwind. Once the film was fully removed I wound it back into the cassette.

A couple of weeks later I found out that the film had been developed and to her surprise it had produced some excellent results. It just goes to show even with a partly exposed colour film that has been sitting in a camera for eight years and extremely out of date, it can still produce some unexpectedly good results!

Yes I will admit that it is a risk when using film well outside the bbd; even more so with colour but I do not believe, like some, that you should only use this film with a so called toy camera as it suggests that if it goes wrong then it's “OK!” You just have to look at the lomograph site to see some excellent photographs. Personally you should have the courage of your conviction, use the best camera you can lay your hands on and embrace the results no matter what!

The colour pictures attached to this post were taken on my F5 on Agfa vista neg film that could have been out of date by fifteen years or so and kept in “iffy” conditions. So I walked into Lincoln on a warm sunny day with this film     and an open mind.  If I had listened to the doom and gloom merchants it was likely a waste of time! As it happens it was a good result even though I would have liked some colour shift to the pictures.

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PMK Pyro after bath.

I have been developing Ilford FP4+ 120 format in PMK Pyro for ten minutes for quite some time, without an afterbath. With my latest use of this developer I decided to change part of the process, instead of inverting the tank every twenty seconds I changed it to every fifteen seconds to see if this increased the density of the negatives. My reasoning is that previous negatives have looked a bit on the thin side. Yes you are right! I could have increased the developing time but wanted to find out how much influence agitation has on the process.

FG 1
Film FP4+

When changing or adapting a method that works well, it is better to change one aspect of it at a time so that it makes it easier to judge whether it is an improvement or not. So what did I do introduce a re-bath of the film in the developer after the fix. The after bath is part of the full process when using PMK pyro that completes the staining. Up to now I have not felt the need to do this but was curious to see how much stain would be added and if it improves the print quality. I did this for the two minutes suggested which I agitated for thirty-seconds at the beginning and ten seconds one minute later.

FG 2
Film FP4+

There has been a marked difference in the density and the colour of the staining on the negatives. The picture marked Fg 1 shows the negatives developed with the afterbath, they have a yellow-brown look to them. Fg 2 shows negatives without the bath and they have a purplish look to them.

These results would suggest that an increase in agitation has just as much effect if not more on the density of the negative than an increase in the process time. The afterbath also produces a significant change in how much stain is deposited which is supposed to help in making these negatives easier to print. I have found that even without the extra staining I have been producing some wonderfully toned photographs. I have not printed this latest set of negatives yet but hope to do so soon.


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