Shooting 30 Year Expired Kodak Ektacolor Gold 160 in the Peak District
With perhaps the exception of the long exposure of the M1 motorway, this was the best shot on the roll. I was impressed by the detail you can see in the tree trunk. 2s 50mm F8.0 Bronica SQ-A.
If you’ve seen last week’s blog, then you know I spent a couple of days in the early summer up in the High Peak of the Peak District National Park (click here if you haven’t). Whilst the trip was mostly shot on Ilford Delta 100 black and white film, I had picked up a couple of rolls of expired (1989) Kodak Ektacolor Gold 160 which I also wanted to test on this trip. Knowing where I picked them up from there was very little chance these rolls had been cold stored anytime recently, but that was the least of my issues.
If this image looks familiar it is because I shot it in black and white in the previous blog. 17s 50mm F11 Bronica SQ-A with 5 stops of ND filters.
Further down, the streams became wider and flowed into larger pools. 1/2s 250mm F16 Bronica SQ-A.
Being about thirty years expired I needed to shoot these rolls at three stops over box speed which was ISO 40. To make matters more interesting the datasheet that came with this film recommend that you don’t shoot this film any slower than 1/10s and there was no information on reciprocity failure. Not something that complemented well a film shot as such a low ISO. I imagine the original use for this film was studio work that involved flash.
The path runs alongside the waterfall all the way down to Greenfield Reservoir. This image really shows off how shifted the colours are to the blue part of the spectrum. 1/4s 110mm F11 Bronica SQ-A with polariser.
Looking back at The Trinnacle (R) a few people have arrived at the rocks on the other side. Unfortunately this photo did not come out very well. It looks underexposed and suffered from camera shake. 1/4s 250mm F16 Bronica SQ-A.
As is often with these things a bit of guess work is required. All I had to go off was Kodak’s modern-day equivalent – Portra 160. There is also a frustrating lack of information on the reciprocity failure of the entire Portra range, but not being the only one wondering, I did manage to find a thread online where some people had worked it out and come up with a time adjustment factor. Ilford provides this for all their films, I honestly don’t know why this isn’t standard practice across all manufacturers. This magic number was 1.35 which gave me the formula t1.35 (t = measured exposure time). Though in practice I think I only applied this to exposures longer than 1s not 1/10s.
I was very happy with this long exposure of the M1 motorway. This film was never designed for exposures beyond 1/10s, let alone eleven minutes! 660s 110mm F11 Bronica SQ-A.
It worked and amazingly it even worked well for a real stress test exposure of 660s (eleven minutes!) which I did to capture the night-time activity of the M1 motorway. Not bad for a film designed specifically for short exposures and goes to show what results you can achieve with a bit of experimentation. The film however was suffering the effects of not being cold stored for much of its life, with a shift to blue tones and the middle of the negatives suffering from brown patches that I tried my best to correct with the brush tool in Lightroom. Still, the colours are not entirely inaccurate, and I think the detail has held up well, especially on the first tree image.
Another landscape, another pylon. The first part of the walk out of Torside car park. 1/15s 250mm F8.0 Bronica SQ-A.
This gnarled, twisted and moss-covered tree made for the perfect subject. Somewhere I will have to return to in the future. 2s 50mm F8.0 Bronica SQ-A.
This set of images fits in between the ones I posted in last week’s blog, rounding off the end of my walk to The Trinnacle as I came down Greenfield Waterfall and then the first part of the second day from Torside car park, through the woods up the dry Wildboar Clough and onto the moorland approaching Bleaklow.
Wildboar Clough was a bit of a disappointment having completely dried up. However it was quite an experience climbing this all the way to the top. 1/8s 50mm F8.0 Bronica SQ-A.
The odd place that had a small bit of water flowing saw large amounts of moss and hydrophilic plants growing on the rocks. 2s 110mm F11 Bronica SQ-A.
Ideally, I would have had two different film backs so I could have shot this and the Delta 100 concurrently, rather than waiting for one to be finished before replacing it with another. This did actually spur me on upon my return home to buy another, although that did end up being its own saga until I finally had a proven second film back without light leaks. Something I intend to make good use of going forward.
I finally saw water when I got to the top, but the stagnant brown (peaty) pools were not very inviting. 1/8s 50mm F11 Bronica SQ-A.
As the peat becomes exposed it dries up and breaks down, furthering the damaging cycle of soil erosion. 1/15s 110mm F8.0 Bronica SQ-A.
If you ever encounter this film stock on a shelf or online, then you too now know how to use it and I hope you also get some good results. Reflecting on the images for this blog has made me think more about doing studio work with my Bronica SQ-A that this film stock was originally made for. In fact, as I wrote this, I realised that the flash sync cables I had bought for another camera do work with my Bronica to enable me to do flash photography without the need to buy anything else. It was so simple in the olden days when all you needed was a standard cable that worked with pretty much any flash unit. That’s opened a whole new world of possibilities and one I will hopefully blog about in the future. For now, I hope I’ve helped you shed a few more doubts about shooting expired films. Even in unideal circumstances it is still possible to take worthwhile photos, just so long as you are willing to give it a go.
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