Old Films

Buying film can be hard. Not 35mm film, of course: you can't walk down the street without tripping over that. But if you want to buy 120 roll film on the high-street, what's the chance you'll be able to do that? If you're lucky, you might run across a traditional camera shop, the sort where there's some out-of-date stock kept in dusty cardboard boxes under the counter. What then? Fall back to 35mm, or buy that out-of-date roll of 120? I need to know. This article presents the results of an at least partially successful experiment and seeks to answer the question "Old Film or No Film?"

Expired Film vs Small Negs

It is very difficult to find any information about exactly how films age. Manufacturers tend to come out with the party line: "the quality of our product cannot be guaranteed after the expiry date". Nothing more specific that that. Not that you can blame them: there are perhaps too many variables to consider. At what temperature was the film stored? Was the temperature constant or variable?

Neither is there much about it on the web: ephotozine has a forum about it, but all you can find there is a bunch of people telling enquirers off for not taking their art-form seriously, and compromising quality for the sake of pence. This is a reasonable enough argument on the face of it, especially for 35mm users, but just how much does that expired film damage the quality of your glorious photographs? Just how expired does the roll of 120 have to be before you're better off using a roll of 135?

So this is the experiment. Having recently acquired a Hasselblad 550 at a very reasonable price, I thought I'd run a roll through it to see how it performed. At the same time I put a roll of 35mm through my trusty old Pentax ME-Super, which must be a similar vintage to the Hasselblad. The Hasselblad's 80mm T* lens is fitted with a UV filter to protect the front element. The Pentax normally wears a skylight filter but this was removed when taking the photographs presented for comparison purposes here.

Right at the end of autumn, I took both the cameras, drove North past Loch Lomand and turned right towards Perthshire to catch the last of the glorious colours. Every time I saw a good shot, I'd get out of the car, set up the tripod, take a meter reading and take a photograph with the Hasselblad, then with the Pentax. To test degradation in colour fidelity, I'd selected a reversal (transparency) film: Fuji Velvia. There's little point in exposing negative films because colour is routinely rebalanced in the printing process anyway.

Now, there's one really important thing to know about loading roll-film cameras. You don't load them the same way you load an open-reel tape recorder (I'm showing my age now!). The film goes the long way around the idler wheel, otherwise you don't get any photographs at all, the back of the film not being quite as sensitive as the front. At least I've ended up with some very nice shots on 35mm!

Next weekend, winter had well and truly arrived, but nevertheless I was out and about with the pair of cameras again. What a good thing you get three times as many frames out of a roll of 135 than a roll of 120! That's why the shots below were taken with next-to-no light in truly horrible weather.

Move the mouse over the thumbnail to view the comparison

These photographs have were scanned on a UMAX 1220S flatbed scanner with a transparency adapter at maximum resolution. Although they could clearly have been improved significantly by having their curves tweaked (e.g. using The Gimp, Krita etc.) for the purposes of this experiment have not been modified in any way.

In the scanned photographs, the 120-format square images were taken on Fuji film with an expiry date of December 1995; the 35mm film was Fuji stock fresh out of the 'fridge from Je****s on Sauchiehall Street, Glasgow. They were both developed by Peak Imaging in November 2003.

On the light-box, there's a clear magenta colour cast on the expired film. The colour cast actually isn't unpleasant, and the resulting scans actually look a lot better on some nasty cheap monitors on which they've been viewed, but viewing the scan on a nice, colour calibrated Apple Cinema Display confirms quite clearly what the lightbox suggested: the colours in the 35mm are much more accurate. This is most obvious on the white farmhouse with the derelict outhouse, and not much less so on the river scene. The colour of the rocks in the foreground is the big giveaway.

On the other hand, the photograph of Glasgow University across Kelvinside Park with the stormy sky seems to benefit from the over-saturation and warmth that the colour cast lends it, making the "true" photograph look cold and reticent.

The Bottom Line

So, what's the answer. It's a bit difficult to say having done only one test on one manufacturer's film in less-than-ideal conditions, but I'd still feel confident in making the following comments.

1. This film is very out-of-date. Eight years, in fact. In view of that, it has performed outstandingly. There is no obvious increase in grain, not much change in speed, only a correctable, if moderate, colour cast.
2. The provenance of the film is beyond reproach. It came from a reputable, independent photography shop in Edinburgh, run by a friend of a work-colleague. It was donated to the experiment as I don't think they'd be caught dead selling any film that old. Because of this, it will have been kept in ideal conditions. I would think twice before buying anything out of date from a high-street shop where it has been kept in the window in direct sunlight for the last four years or more.
3. Colour negative film is colour-corrected automatically at the printing stage. I'd be happier, therefore buying expired negative film than reversal film. That said, I usually work in either monochrome of colour slide media anyway, except when doing colour portraiture work.
4. This test only demonstrated the effect on landscape photographs. The cast might be more objectionable on portraits, seascapes, or other subjects.
5. Both of the films tested are "professional emulsions". My understanding is that this means the film has been pre-aged for some time, until it satisfies very close colour and speed tolerances. The film is then kept refrigerated by the retailer with a very short shelf-life. Conversely, "amateur" (?) emulsions are release immediately, and allowed to age on the shelf. Consequently, the shelf life offered by them is very much extended. It may therefore be much more of a big deal for normal emulsions to be expired than professional ones. Fortunately, 120-format films tend more often to be of the "professional" variety.

Final word? I'd buy expired film to get out of a scape when there's nothing else, but not to save money. It's not much of a saving when the developing cost is taken into account.

Much more important than the subtleties of which film to buy is to make sure you load it the right way around. Here's just one of the ones that got away...

Acknowledgments

Postscript: Very Old Films.

Thanks to Richard Quirk who, on reading this page, sent me some examples of his work with some truly antique emulsions.

He has managed to get hold of some very old film indeed: see below. There is also the possibility of boiling film before use to age it artificially. There is some material on this at the Pentax 110 SLR users' site, published by Paul Maddox: http://www.calcaria.net/pentax110/2006/01/boiling-film.html

Richard Quirk's work on vintage stock

Move the mouse over the thumbnail to view the comparison

He writes:

Many thanks to:

David Muir

for sourcing the expired film, and

Peter McKenna

for wheeling out his vintage UMAX scanner and doing the scans for me.

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