What to expect from expired film?

Rogier

Rogier

Rogier Willems
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I am looking at a buying batch of Expired

Fujicolor 160 Professional NLP 120 L - Tungsten Balanced expired 2/1991 Fujicolor 160 Professional NSP 120 S - Daylight Balanced expired 1/1992

All have been stored at room temperature in the darkroom.

Will te colors just be “off” all faded or what?

Thanks for your advice!
 
One of my friend love to use expired film and some of them are very long expired film (may be 10 y) I've noticed that the shadow area changed. Some time there is reddish in the shadow and other color may be more yellowish.
 
Rogier said:
I expired 2/1991 ...
expired 1/1992
(deletia)
Click to expand...

A few months ago I discovered two rolls of Fujicolor ca. mid-late 1990s which had been stored room temperature or cooler.

Will te colors just be “off” all faded or what?
Click to expand...

I shot one of the rolls! Nasty! Base fog, awful color shift!

IMAO, it would be penny-wise and pound-foolish to buy stuff like that!
 
Expired film is GREAT if you don't care about consistent results. I've had expired film that was 5 years old look like it was made yesterday, and I've had film that was months out of date have really weird colour shifts. The age of the film doesn't matter so much as how it was stored, and I've never seen anyone advertise film that was stored in a hot, humid closet 😉 Everyone advertises that it's been stored in a fridge or freezer... but gives no garauntees as to how it will turn out... read into that what you will.

That being said I'd say go for it if it's cheap and you don't need it to be reliable.
 
i shot a few rolls of that exact same film that expired in 2001 (this was in 2006 or so). I had it pushed a stop in developing, and it could have easily used three. The results were so dreadful that, for the first and only time in my life, I threw away the negatives.
 
Cheap Film

Cheap Film

As the old saying goes "film is cheap, airline tickets are expensive." Why cut corners with something as important as film? Buy Arista brand from Freestyle or bulk load it if you need to save a bit of money, but don't waste your time shooting film of dubious quality.
 
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Would have been nice if it was stored in a fridge. Speed, grain and sharpness should all be fine, but as everyone else said, there will be a colour cast, I'm not sure what the cast of tungsten film is as it ages.

This colour cast not pose a problem if you are printing the negatives yourself. You'll probably find a happy filtration for the entire batch that will work nicely. If you're scanning, you'll probably be happy with a stored offset. Then again, you can print black and white or scan as monochrome and get away with it.

You can also use it for doing nighttime photography where colour is minimal. If you were feeling particularly experimental, you could cross-process it as slide film and let the wacky colours get wackier.

Lots of possibilities -- just don't shoot a wedding with it.
 
I'll shoot whatever film I can get my hands on because I scan and convert to b/w and then adjust the contrast in PS. Just make sure to increase exposure by +1 to +2 or more if it is really old. I just shot a roll of 800 film that was expired back in '02 and it came out looking fresh but I exposed it as iso100.
 
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