Expired Film Pot Luck

You never know exactly what you will get

Back in late summer, I shot a couple of rolls of expired Fujicolor 400 film. It’s not extremely old, sporting an expiration date of 2017. But it’s not exactly fresh either.

These were shot with my Nikon FE2, with the 35-70mm zoom lens. The photo with the boats is from Otsego Lake in Cooperstown, NY. The rest are from the annual Colorscape art show in Norwich, NY.

What I like about expired film is that it pulls everything into the same mood, even if the scenes have nothing in common. A quiet marina and a busy art fair don’t normally share the same atmosphere, but the film gives them a gentle, cool wash that makes them feel like pieces of the same half-remembered summer

The process

Usually, with expired film, I try to overexpose one stop for every 10 years since it expired. These weren’t quite 10 years. I over exposed them 1/2 stop with the exposure compensation setting on the camera. The color seems a little flat, and I can probably spruce them up in Lightroom, but for now, this is what I got from my scanner.

Give yourself a break

Shooting this stuff is a nice break from the rest of my photography. You don’t expect a perfect image. You can’t expect a perfect image. Depending on the film, how old it is, how it’s been stored… you have no idea what you’re going to get. Perfection, expectation, and the process of visualizing what you want from a frame are thrown right out the window when this stuff gets loaded in your camera.

What’s left?

What is left is experimentation. It takes you back to the beginning of learning photography, when you experimented with different apertures, shutter speeds, and compositions to see what worked and what didn’t. Since it’s film, you have the suspense of not knowing what you’re getting until later, when the film is processed.

And you have the excitement of feeding the negatives into your scanner to see what came out. If you were organized and you wrote down your exposure information, that helps your curiosity. But really, what does it tell you? These rolls are mostly a one-of-a-kind experience. The next rolls you get will likely be a whole new formula.

A common pallette

What I found the most interesting about these frames is how the film tied the locations together.

• At the marina, the boats and docks took on a softened blue cast, like looking through a memory instead of a window.

• At Colorscape, all the color, people, booths, brooms, stained glass, got slightly muted, slightly aged, as if the film insisted on giving the present day a 1990s palette.

In the End

These aren’t perfect frames.
They’re not meant to be.

But they carry a mood I couldn’t have created on purpose. And that, to me, is the best part of shooting expired film: sometimes the film remembers the day differently than you do, and the surprise is the whole point.

✅ Where to Find Me

You can find more of my work on the web at: Simmons Photography

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