Found very old exposed Verichrome in vintage camera. How to develop?

Nice result! I've done half a dozen of these, mostly from thrift-shop cameras. In several cases, the recognizable images were down at the end near the spool. I believe that those are better protected from the elements and so survive longer. I doubt that you lost any images because you did something wrong. From the clothing I'd guess early-to-mid 1950s (?) You've done a great job of resurrection.

Edit:
About five years ago I was working with a sheet of film I found in an old Soviet Fotokor camera. I got this image, with apparent moisture damage and possibly a lightstrike from a dark slide being pulled back. I played with scanning in color mode (as I recall--dimly) and crushing the warm tones, skewing the scan toward the blue end of the spectrum. That seemed to bring up some details in the subject's face and in the background. I stand developed in Rodinal simply because I had no idea what the film was. Today, I'd use HC-110.

Found in a Fotokor 3 by terry, on Flickr

Found in a Fotokor 8 by terry, on Flickr

That's interesting, i'll try scanning in colour too maybe I'll get some more detail!

It had an odd and seemingly self-contradictory effect. It increased contrast and reduced fogging in the upper half of the image and yet reduced contrast in the lower part. A friend told me to try this--I'd never have thought of it myself. Anyhow, it clarified the subject's face a bit, which was what I wanted to do. If I had better photoshop skills I could have cleaned it up a lot and maybe made it presentable.

This is a fun topic! One thing I wanted to add is that you shouldn't knock yourself for developing on a reel. It certainly can present some challenges when using vintage film, but the thought of developing using the see-saw method in a tray sounds even worse to me - every old roll I've worked with has been stiff, with a vicious curl that I think would have made it almost impossible to handle by that method.

For reference, here are some other old threads about developing found film which I'm aware of:

Verichrome pan how to?
Kodak Verichrome Pan film in Prewar folder - Developing
Getting 620 Kodacolor X processed?
Kodak Verichrome in #116 format - processed
Developing old 620 film
HC-110 at 40F? (for old film)
HC-110 at 40F? (for old film) – some experimental data

There is also this article by amirco which I think is where I first read about developing found film.

Jeff

Thanks lots of good info and amazing "time capsule" shots from the past the there!

sterioma said:

If I did not have a red light i would have never been able to load that film (and even then it took me a good ten minutes).

Click to expand...

I hadn't checked back on this thread for a while and I just saw your results. Cool!

You weren't alone regarding the difficulty in loading the reel in that arrangement. It took me a really long time, a lot of tries and a lot of very strong language before I was able to get mine loaded. On mine there were only four exposed frames.

Some comments.
I have a small Tupperware of old film in the fridg. They have been there for decades. One was a Verichrome Pan 620 with expiry year on the box of 1976. Serif "Kodak" logo, yellow backing paper, red trailer at the end, For years I had thought that I needed a 620 camera to try it out until I discovered that it fitted quite easily into my old Rolleiflex. So I shot the roll and developed it in Ilford ID-11 to Plus-X times.
Some problems and discoveries.
When loading it into a Patterson spiral, unpeel and discard the paper first. Else it gets tangled up with the film proper.
The very thin 620 spool puts a lot of curl on the film. I cut off the bottom half cm which helped a bit, Even so getting it into the spiral was really dificult.
As with 35mm, it helps to clip or round the leading corners so that it dosn't catch the sides of the spiral.
I had a dim red safelight but was loading in shadow. I doubt if it fogged the fiilm. (35mm I can work in pitch black, but I knew loading 6cm wide film was going to be tough.)
So far so good.
BUT, I was so used to mixing up 290ml of developer that I forgot that I needed 500ml for 6cm wide film. So at the end of the developing process I found that two thirds was fully developed, a one third strip down the side much less so. (Agitation was four inversions during 10 secs each minute.) However after scanning, the "under-developed" parts look about right. The "fully developed" parts are over-developed and lacking contrast. So use less than Plus-X developing times.
(I have just tried to upload an image, but at 1024 kb Phottio is telling me its too big, but not what the max size is. Or perhaps I'm not qualified to upload files.)