Expired disposable film, shot in an SLR, and cross-processed in B&W … because why not?
The “New Click” still in it’s packaging and awaiting it’s fate in the Minolta. I’d call that an upgrade!
I owe much of a my photographic interests to my grandfather. From family slide show nights going through old parties and portraits, his time in the air force as a aerial surveillance photographer, to inheriting his Minolta XE-7 after he passed. I probably wouldn’t be the photographer I am today without his influence. However, my grandmother did not contribute to this photographic legacy … until now!
Cleaning out some boxes at their old house unearthed this little gem of a disposable camera. Behold, the New Click! Complete with 12 exposures of 200 ISO greatness I knew I had to put this to good use. Expired by a year for each of it’s dozen exposures and having spent most of it’s life in a glove box waiting to document a potential accident, I had to set my expectations reasonably low. To keep somewhat optimistic it would work at all I decided to use the film in a real camera so I set about extracting the precious contents.
Disposables are the opposite of normal cameras in the sense that the film is wound into the canister as you advance after each shot. Easy enough! Covered the lens with black electrical tape and fired off a dozen frames in a dark room before opening it up. Removing the cardboard cover revealed a few tabs that were simple enough to pry open and pop out the film.
Note: Some disposable cameras have flashes and batteries. A few AA’s won’t hurt you, but the capacitors that fire the flash can. Critical thinking and common sense go a long way and you can generally get the film out without a full tear down, but if you know you’re the type who is accidentally going to ram a screwdriver into the middle then maybe think twice.
I decided to dismantle the thing entirely just out of curiosity. Simple as it gets! One fixed plastic element, one aperture, and presumably one shutter speed. Reliant entirely on the relatively forgiving nature of consumer C41 film. No indication of what kind of film it was, aside from that it’s supposedly “high quality”, but I did notice Fujifilm branding on the aperture that was poorly covered up.
Expired film loses sensitivity so that needs to be compensated for. Slower films fair better and might not need any correction if stored in a reasonable way, but since it lived in a hot car I assumed compensation was needed in this case. Probably should have gone for 50 ISO, but it was cloudy and wanted to keep it reasonable, so I loaded up the Minolta XD with the meter set at 100 ISO.
I had just picked up the Fuji XF18mm F 1.4 LM WR and was wanting to put it through it’s paces against the XF16mm F1.4. Figured I was experimenting anyway so I brought the Minolta with it’s high quality film a long for the ride. I’ll be damned, it actually worked!
Gnarly tree on the top of Cedar, a favourite subject when I’m inspired enough to go out but not enough to think of somewhere new.
But that’s black and white?!
Yeah, it is. I figured there was maybe 50/50 chance of anything actually turning out. I’m out of C41 chemicals and not wanting to waste money on getting a lab to do it I decided to just develop it black and white.
For comparison sake, here’s the same shot on the Fuji XF 16mm F1.4 … not a particularly useful comparison since it’s like comparing charcoal sketch to actually being there, but serves as a reference at least.
Same gnarly tree on the Fuji XF 16 F1.4 .
I’ve been trying out the Black White & Green developer from Flic Film and had the times for Delta 100 already loaded up into the Massive Dev Chart timer so I ran with that and hoped for the best. The negatives came out … thick for lack of a better word. Pretty sure there is also some kind of anti-halation layer remaining as well that normally would have been removed in the C41 process, and some serious base fog from the hot summers in the car combined forces to the point where the negatives were opaque unless held up to a light. With my limited expectations I was mostly just stoked to see that something actually came out.
Once dried, they were bowed enough to hold up the loupe. In the past with the Digitaliza holder this would have drove me insane, but the Essential Film Holder really does work wonders for holding the film flat. Pretty sure my Minolta XD is having some minor light leak issues which were exponentially worsened by how little of an image actually made it to the film, but in this case it adds something to the effect. The results look like something found in a different century, as if there were scanned from film found on an old battlefield that some soldier developed in the trenches in his helmet. I kinda like it.
Would I go out of my way to able to do this? No. Would I pay money to do this? No way. Would I shoot anything even remotely important? Definitely not. Put free film in front of me and find a way to use it even just for a laugh? Sure, why not.
Thanks grandma.