Monday, September 28, 2015

The Great Film Round Up

Went searching through 2 of my 4 photo supply deep freezers (loaded with film and photo paper). I wanted to see how many sheets I have of my oldest Tri-x 5x7. I found a cardboard box containing 500 sheets (10-50 sheet boxes) that became outdated in 2009. I will use that film this trip. I plan on opening up one of the boxes and shooting some of the film over the next couple of weeks to make sure it is up to snuff. Then if everything is OK I will take 400 or 450 sheets of the stuff to Thai. I have several boxes, 7+ of 2012 outdated 5x7 which I will keep frozen for now.

While rummaging about I also found 2 boxes of 25 sheet Ilford HP5 5x7, that will also stay frozen for now. Someday if Kodak goes completely belly up, and I run out of supplies, I will switch to Ilford HP5 as my main film.

There is plenty of 120 Tri-x film in the stand up freezer, I plan on taking 30-40 rolls. I am also going to take 60-75 rolls of 35mm Tri-x. Not sure how many of those I have ready to go. I do my own film loading from 100 foot Tri-x rolls using a bulk loader and film cassettes. I loaded up a bunch of cassettes of 2012 outdated bulk a while back if I need more I can do that my last week of work before I fly.

In one of the deep freezers I have about $4000 worth of Tri-x 8x10 film. After I shoot all my 5x7 I plan on moving up to the 8x10 and do portraits, probably in Asia. That stuff is all outdated  October 2014, so it should be good for a while yet. After doing the 8x10 I might try moving up to doing portraits with 11x14 film, should about 70 by then : ))

One strange find was a ton of very old Agfachrome 120 50ASA stuff, 100+ rolls. Not sure how I can use that up but need to try to figure out someway. It is pretty ancient, it has been frozen for years so that will help but colour shifts may occur. I wonder if I can use it to re-photograph my negs then use the Agfachrome positives in the darkroom to enlarge down onto collodion wetplate. When I was in New Orleans a while back for my show I met several people who did wetplate in the darkroom from positives. They used a special type of film to make the positives(forget the name now), I wonder if all my old Agfachrome would work. It might!!

You can never have too much film : ))