Developing old film
I have been getting deeper and deeper into the weeds with my photography. The most recent roll I shot was a roll of Eastman No. 10 film that expired in 1931, over 90 years ago. I found it on Etsy, which seems to have a plethora of dealers with really odd, fun films to shoot with.
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Needless to say, a film this old required special treatment. First, I shot it at EI 0.3. You need a lot of light to expose film that’s that slow, so I used my post-war Contax IIIa with its 50mm Sonnar lens at f/1.5 for 1/25 of a second. Just barely fast enough to allow handheld shots, although most of what I got on this roll is kinda blurry.
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Developing it was interesting. The listing for the film suggested developing it cold. There’s not a lot of information out there about developing film cold. One of the only pages I found was by this crazy Russian in Miami, Emir Shabashvili, from 2010 describing his process for developing old film. There’s also a little more detail on this page about a specific roll from a specific camera.
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I used roughly the same process he outlines. I mixed up 500 ml of developer, 50 ml of HC-110 syrup to 450 ml of water, then put that and my usual TF-4 fixer in the refrigerator overnight, along with a gallon of water for rinsing. I pulled the chems out the next morning and developed a test strip as described in Emir’s posts, leaving it in the dev chemistry for varying amounts of time to see what the appropriate amount of time would be. I came up with 9 minutes. So I developed the film in this non-standard dilution of HC-110 for 9 minutes with the developer at 40 degrees Fahrenheit (5 degrees Celsius), full agitation for the first minute, four agitations every minute thereafter, just like most other films I develop. I don’t think the specific temperature makes much difference once you get this low, but the chemicals should be pretty close to each other. Over the 9 minutes, the fixer warmed up to about 45 degrees F, and I assume the developer and wash did as well, so I just let them. After dumping out the developer, I stopped the development with water (I don’t typically use stop bath) and then poured in the TF-4 fixer. Same routine, full agitation for the first minute, four agitations every minute thereafter for 15 minutes. Then I washed with the Ilford method of 5, 10, and 20 agitations respectively. One nice thing about using TF-4 as my fixer is that it’s alkaline, not acid, and therefore you don’t have to wash it as long as you do with acid fixers.
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With all of this, I wound up, based on the histograms from when I scanned the film, with perfect exposures. One reason to develop at a cold temperature is to reduce the amount of fog present on the negatives, and I have to say, it worked a charm. There is basically no fog on this 90 year old film, which is amazing. I got better, more widely spread histograms than I do from some new rolls of film I shoot.
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I got a few other older rolls of film from this seller on Etsy that suggest developing cold like this, but nothing this old. I’m really happy with how this worked out.
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Posted at 2:07 PM
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