Using really old outdated film- results

Just for fun I've been buying out of date films to play with just to

see how they'll come out. Most of the films are within 10 years of

now, but there were a few films in the bunch I've got that were much

older. I threw one out because it wasnt processable anymore.

 

First rolls I tried were Ektachrome 200 and 400 (EPD and EL). Both

were dated to be used by July 1980. All films that I have were kept

in the freezer all their life. I was wondering how the color films

would turn out because of color dye shift and film fog. I got the

results back. The 400 was fogged quite a bit with a green cast and

washed out colors. I have included a scan of that film. You can see

in between frames the black area that is no longer black, but

greenish gray. The 400 was basically unacceptable for images, but

with computer scans and some image work, it ended up in usable

results (see second attachment photo). This did however make the

image grainy manipulating the photo and contrast. Maybe the 400 films

in 1980 were grainy. I basically shot images I wasn't concerned about

saving if it didn't turn out. The 200 film had slight fogging, but in

general the color was quite good. Scanning the image helped the

contrast more which darkenned the slightly exposed blacks on the

frame line in between the images. But the shot needed very little to

give good snappy color. Heres an example for the third attachment.

 

I don't usually make it a habit to use outdated film, but I wanted to

see what kind of results I'd get if I did. I got the bunch because

there were a couple films I really wanted to get, but took the rest

of the group of films too. If I were to do an important shoot, I

would naturally use fresh film. So anyway see the scans to see these

two old Ektachrome films. So color fading on slower films isn't as

bad as I expected.

I can't seem to add photos in this forum, so I added them to a presentation folder in my listing. Here they are:

 

http://www.photo.net/photodb/presentation.tcl?presentation_id=207601

 

Its good to see these old films hold up so well over the years, especially the 200. The color is quite saturated for a 23+ year old film.

Just for reference, on the films of these two the Kodak numbers listed were 6036 and 6074. This was in the days before Kodak started to put the name of the film on the top, but only the film number.

Quite good results considering. One of the threads on today was about shooting in caves, and someone mentioned problems with color balance with natural lighting. But with a lot of subjects, you can have major color shifts and still looks okay- flowers being one of those! Thanks for sharing.