Expired Film - Konica Monochrome VX400

September 30, 2017

Expired Film - Konica Monochrome VX400

I had never considered shooting expired film before. With all the unpredictable variations that are possible, I always preferred to shoot film that would give me a predictable outcome.

Anyway, when a friend sent me some expired film that she had found languishing in a cupboard, I looked upon it as a challenge!

This film intrigued me the most. I was aware that Konica made cameras but did not know they also produced film as well.

I started reading up on how to shoot expired film. There are some very interesting articles and great photos out there! The thing I picked up on was a general rule of thumb; underexpose by 1 stop for every 10 years of expiration. I did not know the expiry date of this particular roll (not printed on the cassette and there was no box). A search in Google revealed that Konica had ceased production of this film in 2007. So, I figured that at least I could put a 10 year expiry date as a guesstimate and shoot it accordingly.

I loaded the film into my Canon EOS 300V and set the ISO at 200.

The specs for this film indicated it was for daylight or flash use so basically I just went out on safari around Newcastle and Lake Macquarie on a shooting spree.

The film & scans came back from the lab with a very low contrast. There was a little more grain than what I had expected from an ISO400 film but, considering that it had been kept for years in a cupboard (and not refrigerated) the storage is probably a contributing factor to that.

Although being a monochrome film, this is developed in C41. In articles I read, the development in C41 may give the film a slight orange hue although this roll came out more a slight sepia tone than orange.

The only digital adjustment I made to the scans was to bump the contrast slightly.