Old paper

[ChrisN]

I thought Christmas had come again. A friend at work gave me several unopened boxes of Ilford paper; 200 sheets of 8x10 matt RC multigrade, 100 sheets of 9.5x12 glossy RC multigrade, and a pack of 16x20. All old, of indeterminate age, but "stored properly". Unfortunately after testing a sheet from each box I have to conclude it is all fogged badly - an unexposed test strip from each, when developed, turns a healthy 18% gray; for the glossy stock it's closer to Zone 2!

Is this stuff useful for anything? Is there any way of using it? I certainly can't get anything like "paper white" with the normal developing I'm familiar with. 😛

 

[gurkenprinz]

Hi, just a thought because I have recently experienced it: Did you take your test sheet from the top of the stack or from the middle?

I am asking because I discovered that - while the top sheets are almost useless - the sheets from the middle of the pack are still quite ok. And that was 40-year-old paper!

 

[jpa66]

Try this thread from the boys and girls at APUG:

http://www.apug.org/forums/forum37/53919-paper-fogging-looking-solutions.html

 

[titrisol]

ilford paper does not age very well, quite shortly (1-2 years) after expiration it starts to fog...
use it for low key photos or for proofs

 

[payasam]

Agree with gurkenprinz about top sheets and with titrisol about use for proofs.

 

[ChrisN]

Thanks for the ideas folks - cheers!

 

[fidget]

When my fellow photographic club members discovered that I was going wet, at a time when all others were going digital, a few gave me their stock of paper.

As a beginner I was grateful for this, but in reality, it set me back weeks. The trouble was that even after I had begun to suspect that there were bad batches, I didn't realise that the problems could vary within a pack. I just could not get onto a steady work flow. All my experimentation was pretty well useless as the next piece of paper would have different characteristics.
I dumped it and bought a nice, new, and as the advert goes "refreshingly expensive" box of Ilford RC multigrade. It made for a far better start.

 

[nikon_sam]

Chris...read up on using "Edwal Orthazite" in your developer...I have some old film I'd like to use but it's showing a base fog...in reading about this I have found articles talking about this...or you can read up on "Benzotriazole"...

 

[Merkin]

one fun thing to do with it is to use it for photograms. Take the paper, set it on a table, put random interesting stuff on it, and turn on the lights. If it is quite old, it will take a bit of time for some sort of image to appear on the paper. Once this happens, pop it straight in to the fix- skip the developer. You can get some really interesting looking ghostly stuff this way. You can also put other prints face down on top of it, and do the same thing.

 

[eli griggs]

Some fogged paper can also be used for Lith printing, something you can read up on at APUG and unblinkingeye.com for starters.

Eli