It’s the middle of summer, high noon. I’m at the beach and I’m sick as hell. A buffeting wind blows from the sea as the blazing sun does all it can to sizzle the meat off of my exposed shoulders. The molten sand shifting under my feet conspires with whatever virus has established residence in my cerebrospinal fluid to spin the world around me in a dizzying kaleidoscope of earth tones and aquas. If I close my eyes I think I’ll fall over and drift away forever, probably. Do they let contagious people into heaven?
“Take my picture, Dad!” A sweet voice sings from the realm of the living. My vision resolves back to our reality and I realize I can’t die yet. My daughter wants me to take her picture.
Teetering, I raise the Canon T90 to my half-lidded pupil, spin a ring (maybe focus, maybe aperture, who can be sure in this hellscape of sweaty fingertips and feverish nausea), and fire the shutter. Picture done. Back to teetering.
Suddenly I’m sprinkled with an oily mist. It smells like coconuts and forces my breath to catch. I stare stupidly at the T90 in my hand, now speckled with droplets of unknown fluid, then confusedly gawp around me. A stranger is next to me and has sprayed me with some sort of aerosolized sunscreen overspray, carried on that overzealous sea breeze which I’ve mentioned.
But is this actually sunscreen? Or is it poison? Is this supposed happy beachgoer actually a bio-terrorist wielding some weaponized pathogen? Am I Patient Zero in some insidious plot? Will they make a movie out of this forty years from now? Will I be played by Tom Cruise’s clone?
I look down and find a dead fish on the sand – my sympathetic comrade. I look up to find a seagull circling overhead – an opportunistic villain.
The Advil Cold and Sinus that I ingested twenty minutes earlier takes hold and my thoughts clear. I snap another portrait of my daughter.
Hey, this Canon T90 sounds great! Its raucous film advance and precise whirring make me temporarily forget that I’m actively dying. I wonder momentarily what the shot will look like, envisioning it in my addled mind, quietly hopeful that it’ll be a beautiful, contrasty portrait with fabulous bokeh (I’m shooting Canon’s FDn 50mm F/1.4, after all). I forget for the moment that I’m exposing film that expired in May. May, 1997. May, more than twenty years ago.
Shooting expired color film is horrible.
Random freaks on the internet say that shooting expired film is great fun. That doing so creates beautiful images with spontaneous color shifts and alternately outlandish contrast or subdued curves. They claim that this unpredictability injects into the craft of photography suspense and anticipation and excitement. The cardboard sleeve that sheathed my 1992 VHS home video release of Cliffhanger, starring Sylvester Stallone, promised similar suspense and excitement. One of these two things does indeed deliver a two-hour rollercoaster that never lets up; the other does not.
I over-exposed my roll of Konica VX200 (that’s what I’m supposed to be writing about, right?) by a judicious two stops. I did this because of the countless disembodied typists on the internet who recite like Good Boy Scouts that we should all over-expose our expired film by one stop for every decade that the film has aged past its expiration.
Does anyone really believe this is a useful rule? It is so laughably imprecise and nonsensical. I love it and want it to be true. But it can’t be true, can it?
Contemplating this rule while shooting my VX200, it struck me (since I was dying of a virus) that this oft-echoed over-exposure rule is very much a bulletproof theory in the same way that the effectiveness claims of Schiff Vitamins’ Airborne® Immune Support Supplements are bulletproof. If I take Airborne® and still get sick, is it fair to claim that the Airborne® did not work? Couldn’t it be true, nay, probable, that taking the Airborne® kept me from getting even more sick?
Doctor Schiff, MD (who is not a real person, nor the creator of Schiff Vitamins’ Airborne®) would surely claim that the only thing that kept the sickness from destroying me completely was the fact that I’d taken Airborne®. And who among us could successfully argue against that position without first discovering and weaponizing a temporal wormhole machine to fold and restitch the fabric of time?
My film was processed and scanned by Richard Photo Lab, and considering that the tech who processed the film was probably not yet born when this film was made and likely wearing diapers when this film expired, they did a great job! The original scans had something of a heavy magenta cast, which I adjusted out of my shots in post while aggressively and silently scoffing in my mind at all the people who say “Konica VX200 has such dope magenta tones, bro!” Listen, all film can be magenta. All film can have good or bad skin tones. Let’s stop pretending we’re not editing every shot in Lightroom.
I know this article sounds like I’m mad about shooting expired film. Am I mad? No. I’m just grumpy because some five weeks after shooting this roll of Konica VX200, I am still sick. I’ve had a migraine for two weeks, and if there’s one thing a four-year-old daughter and a two-year-old daughter do not give a fiddle about, it’s whether or not their caretaker has a migraine. Migraine or not, my dude, the snacks and swing pushes and Disney Princess coloring books better keep flowing or your significant other will come home and find you gagged and tied to a chair in a locked closet. They’ll mutiny.
In conclusion, one should never end a piece of writing with the words, “In conclusion.”
And so, in conclusion, buy new film and support the film industry, or whatever, but if you happen to find some old expired film in the bottom of a crusty camera bag, and you have an active fever, and you need to test a Canon T90, by all means shoot that expired film on the beach in mid-summer while losing an immunity battle against a tenacious pathogen.
But just remember this important rule; when shooting expired film always over-expose your shot by one stop for every decade it has aged, subtract one third stop for every vowel in your camera’s brand name, add two full stops for every month that begins with the letter M, and quack like a duck three times before you press the shutter.
You can buy expired film from our shop here.
But you should probably buy fresh film from our shop here, instead.
Or you can browse eBay for expired film (except you shouldn’t) by clicking this link.
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Love this post. I, too, just happened to shoot a roll of expired film, and also did so in a sick and feverish state during the last weekend getaway of the summer. Who doesn’t love a summer cold?! In my case, I was shooting 17 year old Kodak Elite Chrome 200, which was stored horribly, most recently on a sunny shelf in my office. I originally tried to shoot it at the beach in a Nikonos V, but it alas it slipped off the spool and never fed properly. It got a second chance, and
Cadillac treatment, behind Zeiss glass in my Contax G1. I did not overexpose, in spite of reading the same internet “guidance” about doing so. I shot it at box speed. The exposures were good. Greens and yellows still look great, and blues look mostly good, but the shadows all suffered a massive magenta shift that I haven’t quite figured out how to balance out in Capture1. Would I have gotten less magenta if I overexposed as advised? Maybe, but I would have blown out the highlights in the process. Still love the images — they have a vintage look, and the process was part of the adventure, which makes the captures more memorable. Unfortunately it reminded me how much I enjoyed shooting that film when new, and now I find myself longing for it. To my eye, the Elite Chrome had better saturation than the re-released E100 has, but more natural than Velvia. The 200 speed was also a plus, with little noticeable downside from increased grain. There was a time when you could buy 5-packs at Costco and get it developed and scanned there, way cheaper than you can now. The good ol’ days!