Holy grail of found film.

[Uncle Goose]

What would your holy grail be in the section of found film?? Mine is finding

shots of German U-boat crew or internal U-boat shots. What's yours??

[brucecahn]

Real Agfapan 25 in sheets and 120. Shot at 18 it was magnificent.

[rick_gerbehy1]

ORWO 125....got it from freestyle. 120 rolls processed in ID 11. Best prints I ever made. When I went back to order more it was gone forever.

[gene m]

Jamie Lee Curtis, naked.

[kymtman]

Gene, behave yourself!

[geowelch]

Worn out that old unrated VHS copy of Trading Places already, Gene?

[gene m]

I'm sorry.

[charles_stobbs3]

I once bought a camera in a neighborhood yard sale from a person of dubious sexuality and when I found an exposed roll in the camera I didn't really want to know what was on it so I returned the film to the seller.

[mark_wilson4]

Probably saved yourself a lot of grief

[sw12dz]

I'm gonna hafta agree with Gene again! Great minds think alike!

[roseberry guitars]

I saw those Gene and Stuart and well... not up to the hype. Sorry.

 

My Holy Grail would be the film from the Kodak VPK that George Mallory borrowed for his ill fated attempt on Mount Everest. Not that I'd know what to do with it but Kodak has said there is a good chance it could be developed. Since June 8, 1924 it has been frozen, somewhere, 2000 feet short of the summit.

[jani_heikkinen]

I have already found my holy grail, as I collect presscameras and with a few pre-ww2 professionally used cameras came glass plates that have been exposed but not developed. I am still though trying to figure out how to develop them. However my holy grail is pictures taken from some historical event...

[Mike Gammill]

Any film with pictures of my parents and other relatives dating back to at least the 1930's.

[pico]

How about found prints? I have a little 'bot that searches that auction site for my mother's

family name. I was stunned to find a picture of her taken in the thirties during a hike. I

forwarded the image to her to verify, and it was her. She remembers the picture being taken.

It is the only picture of her during that decade. (I did buy it. Something like $2.50)

 

The seller buys up scrap books and sells the interesting images. Very interesting thing.

[grain]

I once found an autographic at a flea market. The last owner had somehow managed to

put the front cartridge into the case backwards, thus jamming it tightly shut. There was a

roll of film inside, which had been there since that fateful day. When I put the curly film

gently through rodinal, see-saw style in a tray, it yeilded photo's of a new england farm

house, and a proud old man standing at the porch. The image was wierdly changed due to

silver migration, but not badly fogged. I used sodium benzoate to supress the age fog.

The age of the camera, and the film, put it sometime in the 1915 to 1920 area. the man in

the photo was at least eighty. It made me wish I could ask him about his days in the union

army, back in '62.

[chromatic-aberration]

Provided there was some magical way to recover images from it - the infamous bag of film that was accidentally dumped overboard that contained nearly all of the film shot during the Normandy landing.

[frank r]

A clear shot of Lee Harvey Oswald either committing the crime or not. Put all this conspiracy nonsense to rest.

[skygzr]

Jamie Lee Curtis on Mount Everest with a yeti. The yeti doesn't have to be naked. A UFO would be nice.

[al_kaplan1]

A male yeti or a female yeti?

[james_baker6]

Finding out that Robert Capa's D-day film was not really ruined by a lab tech and that the tech gave it all to my father who kept for me in a cool dry place.

[kennetharmstrong]

I found a ton of negs about 10 years ago at Goodwill. Some were 35mm in the old metal Kodak tins, some were medium format. They were all B&W and followed a boat trip overseas, some wilderness and some city shots of what I think was Chicago.

 

When I looked through the medium format stuff there were shots of Nazi youth, gliders with swastikas, etc. It was a fascinating find and I wish I could say I still knew where they were. I have moved about 6 or 7 times since and haven't seen them in years. Of course I can't find them, now that I have a scanner that does negs :(

[johnw436]

1. The moon-landing outtakes with a lighting boom hanging down into the frame. or- 2. Marylin Monroe in the White House hot tub. Hopefully Bobby or Johnny boy were holding the camera so that only she would be in the shot.

 

Just kidding. But either would be cool, you'd have to admit.

 

On a serious note, the found film series from the soldier's camera posted here a few months back simply blew me away. I'd have to say they are the Holy Grail from everything I've seen.

 

I heard stories growing up that my grandfather came back from the war with hideous pictures. He left in early '42 and didn't come home for nearly five years. His unit stumbled upon one or several Nazi death camps at the end of the war. He stayed overseas for nearly a year after the war ended because he got assigned to transport German prisoners. My mother says she saw photos of bodies stacked up like wood. After his and my grandmother's deaths his photo albums were nowhere to be found. My mother and aunt swear they saw them as children while snooping in the attick. My grandfather was upset when he learned that they had seen the pictures. Nobody knows what he did with those albums.

 

If I did find them I would donate them to a museum. He never talked about the war- ever. Not in forty-five years. After my grandmother died he opened up to me a few times about what he had seen and been through, but only in short clips and never in detail. He died shortly after.

[patrick j dempsey]

Gene dont you mean... circa mid 80s. :P

[rustys pics]

Holy Grail of Found Film?

Two possibilities come to mind...

A picture of my Dad in France during WWII.

Some vintage cheesecake shots of Betty Page during her heyday.

 

I can even imagine what cameras they might be in.

For my Dad, a captured German officer's Leica.

For Betty, an old Rolleicord with a very sharp lens please!

[phil_sutcliffe]

How about a picture of a guy on a grassy knoll in downtown Dallas with a Mannlicher + scope, a puff of smoke and a couple of spent cartridge cases.