Expired film and how to make it work for you

I got to the stage when making an inventory of all films and papers became a good idea if not a necessity. Or perhaps, it was the latest redesign and update of the site that prompted me to check what I actually have. But anyway, after cataloguing everything, with quite a surprise I realised that as of exactly 2 years ago I have had no fresh film rolls! The last ones to expire did so in April 2014. Ha!

Is this a problem? No, for me not really, for two main reasons.

Firstly, it depends on what one expects from the film and on their approach to photography. I consider film photography to be - fundamentally - sort of gambling, not so much in the processing stage, but much earlier, at the time of creating each photograph. If we are taking the risk of not knowing till much later whether the perfect image we envisioned is really there on the negative, then why not to add an extra layer of gambling in simply not knowing how the film will behave. As the film ages, its speed, contrast, colour balance and fog level will start changing. How quickly the ageing progresses depends on the film itself as well as some external factors such as ambient temperature and humidity levels. And so it really is crucial how we store it.

While searching online for any official recommendations, I came across this short document (pdf) by Kodak from 2005 (local version here in the case the link breaks down at some point). And so we are coming to the second reason. Properly stored film may actually stop ageing, or at least severely slow down. What are the required conditions? Briefly speaking low temperature and low humidity, and we are really talking about freezing, sub-zero temperatures.

I have to admit that my 135mm rolls have been continuously refrigerated only over the past 2 years (11 C) but previously have lived in some very rainy England and got transferred to dry and hot Australia, so some significant changes may be already present. I'm actually quite excited about trying them out at some point. But, if you do want to have as much control over your films as possible, then proper storage is a key and you must really do it right from the beginning. Of course, assuming your dealer sold you fresh batch and/or they knew what they were doing and refrigerated the films themselves :)

Anyway, hopefully a good reference to have!

#techniques