Monday 22 February 2010

Keep it quiet – Expired film

I’m in two minds about writing this blog post –it’s something I really should be keeping to myself. But oh well, hopefully you won’t believe me anyway!

There’s a lot made of film expiry dates – there’s fear about colour shift, increased grain… fears that after the use by date has passed film is fit for nothing but the bin.

It even goes beyond use by dates, if your precious collection of Fuji Velvia is tucked away next to the chicken drum sticks in the freezer it’s feared the emulsion will melt away into the heavens leaving you with a box of expensive but totally useless sheets of plastic.

I’ve never really followed this way of thinking, 4x5 sheet film is expensive stuff – a sheet of Fuji Velvia is currently around the £2 mark, Kodak E100G around a massive £4 a sheet – you don’t want to be leaving your shutter open by mistake when you’re using that stuff! I always keep my eyes open for expired film – there’s some bargains to be had out there (possibly partly down to the very paranoia I’m talking about here!), and the truth is, as long as it’s not been stored on top of a radiator for the past 10 years, chances are it’s going to be fine.

You normally find that film that is sold on auction sites has been stored in either a freezer or at least in a cold place. A lot of this stuff comes from people who have been stupid enough to give up film and move over to digital (don’t worry, they’ll be back ;o) so they’ve been pretty careful with the storing of their film. Of course there’s nothing to stop them saying it’s been frozen when it hasn’t but that’s just a chance you’ve got to take.

I have a few boxes of Velvia 100 Quickload, dated 2006-8. I got them early on when I moved over to large format before I realised the error of my ways! As I didn’t really care much for it I wasn’t going to bother taking up any more freezer space to store it – I’m told the film to food ratio in our freezer is tipping too heavily in the favour of film as it is! So it’s been lying around the house, at first in the outside storage cupboard and then in my office room where it’s pretty warm. Generally not ideal places to store film.

When I came to use it a couple of months ago (I find it’s good for autumn colours if nothing else) the resulting 4 years out of date, stored in a warm office transparencies were absolutely fine, just as good as the in date Velvia 50 sheet I exposed at the same time. 

I also tried out a couple of sheets of Astia which I found lying around in a double dark slide the other day, no idea how old they are but they’re going to have been in their a long time, and the double dark slide had been stored in the office for a at least a couple of years. Again, the results were fine – no obvious colour shift, no excessive grain.

As my much loved Fuji Astia is cruelly being taken away from me very soon I’ve been stocking up, I’ve got in the region of 1,200 sheets so far (if anyone has any they don’t want, do let me know!). This has included buying up some out of date boxes, the oldest one of which ‘expired’ in 1998, remember way back then – Billie at number one with “Because We Want to”? With the last remaining boxes of 50 sheets of Astia going for $90, this box of 50 was something of a bargain at $6.17! I was told it had been stored in a refrigerator but 12 years out of date – even I thought this might be pushing it.

So this weekend I did a test – I loaded up a Grafmatic with a sheet of 12 years out of date Astia, one sheet of Quickload (expired 2005) which I removed from it’s envelope and put in the Grafmatic, and a sheet with a use by date of 2010. The Grafmatic let me fire off 3 shots in quick succession of the same scene and then processed them all together in Kodak E6 chemicals.

The results are pretty amazing – the 12 year old film is very close to being identical to the 5 year old film, slightly less saturated maybe, grain is fine. And compared to the in date Astia – well there’s very little difference. It’s actually closer colour wise to the 1998 stock, the 2005 having a slightly bluer cast. Of course we’re also comparing 2 different version of the film here, the 1998 and 2005 film is Astia 100, the 2010 is 100F – so this may account for any differences in colour – the 100F does look more neutral.
The fact is, if you didn’t have the others to compare them with you wouldn’t see a problem. So my $6.17 box of 50 sheets were a bit of a bargain!

So… I’d rather you didn’t buy out of date film, it would leave all the more for me to pick up cheap! If you must follow my example though I would recommend testing a sheet before you have to rely on it. And if colour is critical use your film that’s closer to being in date. For me any slight colour cast you may get isn’t the end of the world, it’s all fixable.