Purple Rain on 47-year old expired film – The Whole Roll

My dad (Derek, shot #7) is a war baby born in 1941. So, when I found out that there is an annual nearby 1940s weekend in Welshpool that falls on his birthday it was a no-brainer day trip to take him on. Of course, it would be a good event to shoot some film at too, but which camera and what film should I take?

The camera was an easy choice, my Yashica MAT EM. I often travel with two Yashica TLRs, one for colour and one for black and white. Their image quality is great, they’re not heavy, and I can easily fit two in a bag. For this day trip, I’d only need one TLR, so that just left the film to choose.

I shoot a lot of black and white, but for this event I wanted some colour. I find a lot of the decently-priced available films are too modern looking for my liking, they can be great in the right situations but I wanted a more vintage look for this event. So, I thought that the desaturated tones of Lomochrome Metropolis would be perfect and order one roll of 120 from the interweb.

However, by the day of the event my Metropolis hadn’t arrived! It’s funny how much we can pre-visualise what our shots are going to look like before an event, so I was disappointed so say the least! This left me to rummage around to see what was in my fridge, plenty of B&W, some expired Pro400H, some new Lomo 800, nothing seemed quite right. Then, I found it!

On a boiling hot day some two years earlier, I’d been to a car boot sale and found a roll of 120 in a bucket for 10 pence. It was a roll of Kodacolor 400 that expired in 1977, so it would be 47-years old by the time I was going to shoot it! This would be the oldest roll I’d ever shot and I had very low expectations of it. I knew there was a good chance of getting nothing from it or that there would be some horrible colour shifts but that I might be able to get some images that could be converted to black and white. After all, when else would I find a reason to shoot this roll?

So, it was loaded into the Yashica and I set my light meter to ISO-12. My dad had a great day, even the crowd sang happy birthday to him! Luckily, we were blessed with some lovely September sunshine in Welshpool, but I still had to shoot pretty-much wide open and at low shutter speeds. Never the less, I was amazed to see some images on the negatives once the roll had be developed. Once I’d scanned an converted them though, the heavy purple fringing was very obvious on every frame but the colours in the centre of each image seemed pretty good (e.g. shot 1).

So, I spent some time in lightroom to see if I could reduce the purple before the last resort of converting to B&W. Some of my edits are more successful than others. The images at the beginning of the roll had the most purple fringing and were the hardest to fix, I guess this was because they were on the outside of the roll and had degraded more than those in the centre of the roll. The frames at the end of the roll came-out best, I think. Overall though, I’m really happy with the images and they’ve definitely got the vintage vibe that I’d been after. I’ve since bought some more very expired Kodacolor so hope I get lucky again!

Thanks for reading this, I hope you find an old film to shoot sometime! You can see more of my work on Instagram or my website

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