A friend asked me to look at some old cameras that had belonged to her late father.  Various machines emerged from the bags, some lovely and some less so.   One of the cameras had a part used film and from what I could see from empty box in the bag, a Fujichrome 200.  The next pocket on the bag revealed two more unused rolls of the Fujichrome.  The film had all expired some 18 years before and had seemingly never been in a fridge.

Amongst some other gear I had acquired at a local auction house was a Voigtlander Vito B that looked reasonably serviceable after a clean.  The Fujichrome seemed like a good opportunity to do a function check on the little built like a brick Vito.  The movement of the film carriage on these actually cocks the shutter, so testing it with a film was quite important.  I wasn’t actually expecting the film to produce any real results, but it would determine if the shutter cocked and similar.

The film was shot rated at ISO125 instead of the box speed of 200.  I tried to use the film on sunny days, so being where we are, it took a while to shoot all 36 frames.  Couldn’t see  any sense in using the prepaid bag to send the film to Fuji Film and I suspect the processing site might well be a housing development by now. AG Photolab did the processing and my expectation was a blank set of transparencies, or the vague semblance of an image on some.  

Roll 1The scene determined how much colour correction was required

As soon as I opened the envelope I knew the Fujichrome had exceeded expectations, though there were two issues.  Firstly a colour shift, seemingly towards red and secondly, I probably hadn’t needed to over expose from the original box speed… some of the shots showed slight over exposure. Colour reversal film doesn’t degrade as quickly as colour negative.

Excited at the first roll, the second roll then went into an Ihagee Exa 1A.  I did some rather experimental stuff with a set of bellows for the camera and produced some accidental abstracts.  On the whole though, another pleasing roll of film given the age of the film and the considerably older camera.  This time around though I managed to improve on the scanner settings, making a better job of subduing the colour cast.

Here are some results from the second roll, I hope you like them given the age of the films and the cameras used.

Expired Fujichrome roll 2This one needed the reds subduing a little

Expired Fujichrome roll 2This image didn't need any significant changes,

Expired Fujichrome roll 2This image was even warmer looking than this originally, just needed cooling down a little, but I still like it.

Expired Fujichrome roll 2Something more abstract. Trying to get a fern frond on a windy evening with bellows on the Exa 1A... silly idea.

Expired Fujichrome roll 2Old ship, old film, old camera.

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