Experiments with 30-year-expired Fuji Super HR 1600
The types of film that are currently available are a fraction of what was on the shelves during the pre-digital era, so to shoot some of the ones now discontinued you need to shoot expired film. I wrote an entire blog on this subject which you can see here if you haven’t already: https://www.gregoryowain.co.uk/blog/how-to-shoot-expired-film.
So, when the opportunity came up to shoot a roll of Fuji Super HR 1600 that had sat in the fridge for more than thirty years, it wasn’t something I could overlook. To recap the general rule of thumb when shooting expired film – you need to shoot one stop over for every decade expired. In this instance I needed to shoot at three stops over which, thankfully in this case, came out at a very usable ISO 200. This was by far the oldest roll I had ever shot (it expired more than three years before I was born) so I decided I would get experimental with it and shoot a lot of abstract work that didn’t rely on detail. In fact, I was hoping the high grain and possible funky colours would add something extra.
To my shock when it came back from the developers the images all had a surprising level of colour accuracy with no colour shifts at all. This goes to show that keeping your film in the fridge really does make a difference in preserving it, even well after it has expired. However, it still had lost its sensitivity to light and I do feel on some images I would have been better off shooting it at ISO 100 (four stops over the original ISO).
What really struck me about the look and feel of the images is that, with their certain lack of saturation, they looked exactly like the photos in my classic issues of National Geographic from the 1960s and 1970s. Film emulsions have moved on a lot since this roll was made so that retro look is something you can’t even replicate with modern film. I was really happy I not only got a chance to shoot with this now extinct stock but also able to create classic looking images to match the ones I had poured over carefully in print.
Sadly, it is rare to find expired film that has been stored in the fridge that long so it is most likely the only opportunity I will get to shoot a roll of film like this, thankfully I did my best to make it count. I will continue to keep my eye out for what is available however I do advise people not to pay over the odds as, at the end of the day, you are essentially buying a faulty product. Especially if it is a film stock that is still available, make sure you pay a lot less than a fresh roll and only pay decent money for rare items that have been well stored.
Do you have any rolls of expired film that have lived in your fridge a long time? If so, perhaps now is a good time to dust them off and get them in either younger hands or your old camera. Like me you may be surprised at how much you like the results.
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