Class of ‘03
I’ve been lucky enough to get my hands on a roll of Kodak Ultramax that had expired in 2003 (thanks Rob). I’ve used Ultramax before with good results - in low light through to bright/high contrast - being a mid-range 400 ISO it holds its own really well in most scenarios. I took my camera out on a fairly bright, sunny day with very little cloud cover and loaded this roll in. When it comes to expired film, the general consensus is to rate 1 stop slower than box speed for each decade it has been expired. I didn’t want to go too far and over-expose, so settled on metering the camera to 200.
You will see from the shots below that in clear light it performed really well, if a little grainy - but I can’t complain about that. As I got further into the day and the sun started dropping, you can really see the light sensitivity lost over time, which I guess should have been expected! One thing that really struck me was how deep the blues came out, with some fantastic tones across the sky.
I am definitely going to re-visit using expired film in the future, so will hopefully be able to play round with different ISO ratings on the camera as well as over exposing in lower light.
