Shooting 30 Year Expired Kodak Ektacolor Gold 160 with a No.1 Pocket Kodak
A Jaguar E-Type always makes a grand subject. The colours are mostly accurate here and it doesn’t seem to be a coincidence that this image had the shortest exposure on the roll. 1/2s (B Mode) 111mm F32 focus set at 3m.
Shooting expired film seems to have become a regular speciality for me. If you’ve seen last week’s blog, you’ll know I picked up a couple of rolls of Kodak Ektacolor Gold 160 which expired in 1989. I shot one roll in my Bronica SQ-A and the other roll I shot in my 1920s No.1 Pocket Kodak camera, which I will cover in this blog. Now this really was pushing the boat out there. Expired film that wasn’t supposed to be used with long exposures, shot in a camera that was never designed for colour film. Not exactly making life easy for myself, am I?
In contrast the images with the longest exposures suffered the worst of the browning in the middle of the frame. 250s 111mm F16 focus set at 5m.
To quickly recap from last week, I needed to adjust all my exposure times by a factor of 1.35 to compensate for the high levels of reciprocity failure (based off of the modern equivalent Portra 160). This was doubly important when using this camera as I’d never shoot it any wider than F16 which gave very long exposures when I was shooting the film at ISO 40, three stops over box speed, to compensate for its long expiry.
Derwent Dam gave a textured subject to test detail. Far from the standards of the Bronica SQ-A, but still impressive when you take into consideration the circumstances. 7s 111mm F45 focus set at 8m.
I tried to highlight this conifer as it emerged from the bracken. 16s 111mm F45 focus set at 5m.
I shot most of the images on my evening walk along Derwent Reservoir on a different day to when I took the film images with my Bronica SQ-A. I was attempting to take a photo of the Strawberry Moon as it rose over Howden Dam. However, this was a hard lesson in planning and understanding a location through previous scouting. I had my theoretical position right, but the geography of the landscape meant what I wanted was never going to occur.
This view will look a lot better in autumn when the trees have turned orange, red and yellow. 7s 111mm F45 focus set at 8m.
The fallen levels of the reservoir reveal more and more of the sandy and muddy bottom. 16s 111mm F32 focus set at 5m.
In all honestly, I was simply impressed that anything had come out at all. These images certainly aren’t at detailed as what came out of the Bronica, which shouldn’t come as any great surprise given the differences in technology, and they did suffer more from the browning of the centre. But they’ve still given me something to write about and I was extra happy that the image that came out best, with the least amount of colour shifting, was the final image of the Jaguar E-Type. This was also the image I took that had the shortest exposure time. Looking into this further the two images with the longest exposure time did have the most browning so this was likely linked. The longer the exposure the more this old and tired emulsion fell apart. Though it does then come as a surprise that the photo of the M1 I showed in last week’s blog didn’t have this issue. Perhaps this was counteracted by the brightest part of the image being in the centre.
The bracket fungi on this tree stump stood out to me, especially as little surrounded it. Again like the other very long exposure, it suffered heavily from central browning. 250s 111mm F22 focus set at 5m.
I certainly don’t think I’ve any real keepers here but that wasn’t the aim of the test, and this has made me all the more excited to try and shoot fresher rolls of colour film with this camera to see what kind of results I can get. For something so simple it is certainly giving me hours of fun.
The final image of the roll. The brown shift actually helps accentuate the sunset here. 20s 111mm F45 focus set at infinity.
As a little bonus I was lucky enough on that evening to get this photo of a young tawny owl. I had retreated into the woods and hid under my coat to stop myself being eaten alive by the black clouds of midges. Just as the sun was setting, I heard the owls calling and saw this one swoop down onto a branch that was head level from me a little distance away. Thankfully owls can sit very still, and by some miracle I managed to get a few sharp shots at 1/10s at 200mm on my D850, allowing me to dial in a very usable ISO 1250. I’d failed to capture the moon, but I didn’t come away empty handed. That and the images from this roll of film made for a very successful evening.
The surprising bonus of a young tawny owl. Always pays to have a telephoto lens with you if you can carry it. Certainly not a shot I could have taken on the pocket camera. 1/10s 200mm F4.0 ISO 1250 Nikon D850.
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