Old bulk film, Barfen BBW ? Ilford HP4 ?

[christopher_dold]

I saw this bulk can of film in a local junk shop. The tin had been opened and

the black bag inside was disturbed so that I could actually see the edge of the

film roll, so i figured there wasn't much point to buying it even for the two

pund asking price.

 

A week later I figured that it might be handy for dummy film if i needed to

check the feed on any cameras so i went back and found it still resting under a

skylight in the summer sun with the lid off. I knocked the price down to a pound

and felt pretty satisfied with that and some magicubes.

 

The tin says

 

100ft 30m, 400 ASA 27 DIN, Fast Speed, Barfen, BBW 400x, OPEN IN TOTAL DARKNESS

(!) MADE IN UK, Dev. By Oct 1981.

 

There is a label on the bottom of the can that says

 

Ilford fast Speed 400ASA

 

I was just going to load a cassete in daylight and then thought 'what the

heck?', so I put it in my dark bag, taped the outer part of the roll, pulled the

first foot or so from the center of the reel and cut that off. I loaded a

cassette and, just for fun, put it in a Nikon AF240 that has been sitting in a

drawer.

 

I fired off the Nikon as I walked around locally and luckily my taping held and

i was able to wind the film back without sticking up the works. Remarkably, I

had been able to estimate 36 frames just by hand loading.

 

I had just enough Ilfosol left for a 1+9 mix and some fixer needed using up. The

Nikon defaults to 100 ISO on non DX coded film so i gave this stuff six minutes

at 20C.

 

Thirty six images were produced! A bit grainy in the scan and the exposure lacks

a bit. Two shots show a nice blurred image of my fingers where I was not paying

attention to what I was doing. There is a bit of fogging around the perforations

for the later frames, these would have been near the end of the film (last in

first out so to speak).

 

Question is: Is the film actually the Barfen that it says on the can or could it

just be some later film that has been put in there ? The edge of the film

appears to say that it is Ilford Hp4.

 

Has the film become less sensitive with age so that the open bag has less

serious effect that it might have had when it was new ?

 

Might I get better results with a different developer and\or ISO setting ?

[mad1]

you may not have problem if you pull out 1-2 meter from this roll because the light cant get through the thickness of the film when its rolled. Only the top 3-4 turns of film will be wasted... I hope it has not been poped to light for half an hour ;).. 1 sec is ok, depending if it was outside, full sun and you took out the whole film... Try by cutting the iso half and use agressive dev like hc110... g luck

[mad1]

plz give us an exemple

[christopher_dold]

HC110 looks pretty good value! 32litres of developer for fifteen pounds, that's about a hundred rolls of 35mm 1 fifteen pence a roll plus fixer.

 

Thanks for the info.

 

I've got a baseline to work from now, so I guess I'll try it one of my manual cameras and see what results I get from different speeds and development times.

 

I've put three pictures on my gallery. I think that the scanner may be exaggerating grain. I'll try to do some prints in a couple of weeks (college darkroom) and see how they look.

[mad1]

hc110 gives big grain... try xtol, it's a great value too! I usually use hc110 too but for this i would use xtol or diafine.