Developing film exposed in the 60s?

[olleorama]

Hello, found some old film, allegedly exposed during the 60s. I want to try to develop them. The rolls are all 35 mm, and there are 2 rolls of Fp4 (20 exposures each, didn't even know they existed) and one plus-x pan.

Anything I should think about? Are there any problems with really old film? I know they can get very grainy with age. For the moment all devs I have at home are rodinal and diafine. My initial thought would be to soup them in diafine, and pray basically.

All hints are appreciated.

 

[fschifano]

That's a tough one. You'd think that Diafine might be almost perfect for this sort of thing. It can give a speed boost to most films, yet even when developing film shot at box speed, it won't blow the highlights all to hell. But it does have a down side to it. Most of the films I've ever developed with Diafine have exhibited more than the usual amount of base fog that you find with more conventional developers. This isn't a big problem with fresh film, but old film has a tendency to develop age fog, and I think that Diafine would only exacerbate the problem. Rodinal is very good at controlling base fog. Some of the cleanest negatives I've seen have come out of that soup; but it will cost some film speed. That's not something you'd want to give up because film that old will likely have lost speed and the latent image is almost certainly degraded. Given the choice, I'd probably live with the extra base fog and go with the Diafine. I think you'll recover more information, and it's no big deal to print through the extra base fog.