Shooting expired film - Agfa Optima 100

According to the “rule” of shooting expired film, for each decade that has passed, you should compensate with 1 stop on the ASA, so I set my Pentax Spotmeter to ASA 25. On ASA 100, one stop is 50 and two stops is 25. I did two stops, since the film exipred in 2004.

We were driving around the island and didn’t exactly have a plan for the trip. The weather wasn’t that good and the light was pretty boring. We first stopped along the road to take some pictures of horses gracing in a field, but I couldn’t really get the shots that I wanted.

We kept on driving and as we got closer to one of the beaches the weather changed a bit. The light got better and because of the the wind, there was a mist from the rough seas. After gathering the essential gear, we walked down to the beach and started scouting and shooting.

The light got really good and I was really exited. I crossed my fingers and hoped the film would develop ok.

The next day I quickly started to develop the film in my laundry room. I double checked my C-41 developer just to be sure it hadn’t gone bad (I must admit that this has happened to me). It was still working, so I started the process. For this I used the Cinestill C-41 kit which includes the actual developer and a bleach/fix solution. I rinsed it of afterwards and put in a bit of Photo-flo. I then removed the film from the tank and there were pictures on it. And the negatives looked pretty good. At least most of the. The first two looked kinda bad. There were big marks all over the negatives. It looked like the developer had soemhow got stuck to certain areas of the negatives. And the same thing was on the last two negatives. lots of big spots. So something have certainly happened to the film during storage for the last 20 years. But the middle negatives looked much better.

I did scan all the images with my Nikon Coolscan 8000ED and the pictures from the middle part of the film was much better than I had thought. Some of them was actually just about perfect in my eyes. I really liked the color tones in them.

So I’m really looking forward to go out again and take more pictures with this film. I still got 4 rolls in the fridge and I’m going to wait for a day with good lighting. To bad we’re entering the time of year when there’s almost no light here above the arctic circle. But if I’m lucky there will be a few days when the weather is good and there are some rays of light left in the sky.