102 year old film working in 2014!

G'day all.

I recently got my hands on some an ultra vintage 6x9cm Kodak Premo Film Pack manufactured in 1912, expiration date 1st October 1913. I of course wanted to shoot this film seeing if it still works so under safe light I taped a sheet inside my 1920s Kodak Hawkeye 2A Model B 116 camera and having to guess how much to overexpose I made 30 sec at f-11 in sunny weather as a starting point and took a photograph of some WW2 anti-tank pyramids at Port Kembla Harbour. Under safe light I developed the film sheet in Caffenol C Delta for 11 min at 20 deg C and fixed for 5 min and was very happy to see the image form on this 102 year old film!!! Then I realized the film was solarized so that was way too much exposure but made a cool solarize effect on that exposure! A few days later I shot my 2nd exposure, this time at f-16 for 15 sec photographing Port Kembla Harbour. I developed for 10 min and fixed for 5 min and got a very nice negative without solarization so I was really pleased!!! There was some deterioration to the emulsion showing sooty black spots but otherwise the film worked extremely well for being over a century old!!! Below are a couple of snaps of the exposures I did and those who want to see the scans of them on Flickr here is the link to the album https://www.flickr.com/photos/51853869@N08/sets/72157647424096839/ . I am now at a point that I am confident I can make any film from the 1910s to the 1930s work using exposure time of 10-15 sec in sunny weather at f-16 aperture, I seem to get consistent results using such exposure times with the films I've shot from those eras!

That's AWESOME!!!!

wow, over 100 years old. Well done!

For film that old it looks great!

Jeff

Cool stuff! Hats off to you for giving something like that a try!

Thats a piece of history with you!
(I'll say it 1st - no digital can take pics if it's 100 yrs old )
Jokes apart, amazing that it works after all these years. Just amazing.

Sent from Tap-a-talk

Haha omg....!

You should sell your story to Huffington post or similar.
"Man exposed and developed 102 year old film, you won't believe what happened next!"



Congratulations though, very cool to see it worked, most people would stick the box it into a display-cabinet, off-sorts, to show off the "patina" and never use it

1912!? That would be when the Titanic sank. That is a long time ago...
Bet you today's digi pics will not be salvageable at all a century from now. I'll have a look at the Flickr record. Always interested in how ancient films come up.

We all knew that expiration dares were made conservatively...

Great to learn that you did not use a restrainer.

AgX said:

We all knew that expiration dares were made conservatively...

Click to expand...

A very appropriate typo! "Who dares wins!" eh?


RR

Glad to know that the film that I have in the freezer will outlive me, even if unprocessed, and even at my young age!

I'm taking my film out of the freezer and shutting her down.

Well done! Amazing!

As as a matter of interest any idea of the conditions (I guess temperature being most important) it has been kept in?

Russ

I'd definitely use a restrainer for cleaner results.

The oldest I've done is 60 year old swiss colour film, though it had already been exposed, it had old wedding photos on it.

That was the trouble in the "old days" They never made anything to fail

I wonder if this is a record

pentaxuser

Helinophoto said:

Haha omg....!

You should sell your story to Huffington post or similar.
"Man exposed and developed 102 year old film, you won't believe what happened next!"

Click to expand...

Rofl. That is such a standard line these days!


Sent from Tap-a-talk

Brilliant! Please share more. Thanks a lot.

This amazes me! As said above, guess I won't worry about all the old film in my freezer - it will far out last me.

Back in the 1950s, I worked is a camera store department of a photofinisher. One day a roll of film was brought in that a customer found in a corner of an old trunk. The finisher precessed the film and it was of a young officer standing in front of a Spad fighter airplane. When the customer picked the prints up, he said that was a picture of him in World War 1. Those old films were blue sensitive only and heat would not fog them as it can more modern films. The pictures were sharp and clear...Regards

I have no idea of its storage condition as I bought it off Ebay only recently and nothing is said in the description except I think it was stored in a cupboard judging by the English translation as I bought it from a French Ebayer.

It's probably not safety film but the highly combustible nitrate type. I would be careful using anything that expired in 1913.

That is, awesome.

I can vouch for Panatomic X that expired in 1958. It still made 20asa and did okay in some fairly used Caffenol. Old and slow is the way to go!


--nosmok

A bit of an update on my 1913 Premo film, I came to realization my fixer was pretty much shot as I was noticing my negatives lately were looking quite dense after fixing so I decided to mix some new fixer and refix my dense films including those two exposures from the film pack and the films now look even better with far less fuzzy grain on scanning. My new scans of this film can be seen on Flickr via the links:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/51853869@N08/15556991722/
https://www.flickr.com/photos/51853869@N08/15370005358/
And here below are some snaps of the negatives themselves over my DIY light box