Almost a year ago now, I had the idea to try and double-expose an entire roll of film. The idea was to load it in the camera, tighten the roll, and then draw a line on the film where it emerged from the cannister. Then I would close the back, wind the film on until the counter read “1” and commence shooting. After finishing the roll I would then repeat the process, reloading the film so the mark was aligned as before and then shooting all the frames again, hopefully aligned correctly. As this was something of a fun experiment, I decided to use a roll of expired film – some Agfacolor 200 – that I’d acquired with a camera I’d bought. I had no idea how the film had been stored and only a rough guess as to it’s age (which I placed at around 2005 for the original expiry), so it seemed a good choice for this potentially sacrificial mission. On my first outing I shot around six frames, taking care to frame and expose subjects in such a way as to be suitable for double exposures.

Then another set of restrictions hit, followed by another national lockdown.

The camera sat on the shelf, the roll of expired film gradually getting older, and every chance I did have for photography was utilised for stuff I really wanted to do, rather than this potentially fruitless bit of fun. Nontheless, it didn’t slip my mind completely and I always intended to continue when I had more time. So, last weekend, I decided to go shoot the remainder of the roll – ignoring the double-exposure idea for the remaining frames, but with the intent of re-winding the film and double-exposing just the initial six frames I shot last year.

Sadly, in the interim period, my Olympus OM-1n has redeveloped a fault it had before, and which I though was fixed. The problem consists of the shutter locking after making a shot. Normally, the shutter is pressed and the frame advanced, resetting the shutter. Now though, on most frames, it would fire the shutter, but after advancing the film the shutter button would remain locked. The film advance would still work however, allowing another frame to be advanced but also (don’t ask me how) firing off a shot at the same time. It would them be good for another proper exposure. The unintended shots are almost always afflicted by heavy camera shake due to the way they are made when the lever is being advanced and it pretty much means that 50% of the roll gets wasted (although the fault is slightly intermittent and the camera would sometimes work properly for a few frames in a row).

The end result of this is that I had a roll of film (24 +3 exposures) that definitely had a lot of garbage frames and also, possibly, might look like crap anyway becuase of the unknown quality of the expired film itself. As I don’t have the ability to develop C41 film at home – or at least don’t have the chemicals required – I was left with two options if I wanted to see if there were any half-decent pictures on the roll: take it to a lab and pay for processing; or develop it at home using the black and white chemicals I already have. Being a skinflint, I decided on the second option…

A bit of research led me to a number of different develoing methods, many of them involving stand-development, but also some regular development too. I knew that I would be using some Adox Adonal (Rodinal by any other name), so was able to narrow my results somewhat until I found a YouTube video that had some promising looking instructions.

So, following the guidance, I developed my roll of colour C41 film for 15 minutes at 20° in the B&W chems, agitating with gentle inversions for the first minure, and then four inversion at the start of each subsequent full minute. I wasn’t expecting the best results, and was partly expecting the entire roll to be beyond use, but after fixing and washing the negatives I was pleased to see some images, albeit on a very muddy orange looking film base. I dried them for a few hours and then attempted to make some scans.

I wondered if I might have to scan them as colour in order to remove the colour mask, but found that one of the monochrome settings in Silverfast gave me an acceptable, if somewhat flat, result. Importing them into Lightroom I was able to zap them with a bunch of contrast and other tweaks to get much better looking pictures although there was a heavy ammount of grain present – almost like a 3200asa film.

The pictures in this post are the best of the set. While I wouldn’t go out of my way to repeat this process, it’s good to see that it produced salvageable results – results which I’m actually quite happy with.

Oh, and all the double-eposures were complete rubbish and I didn’t even bother to scan them. 😀

Expiry unknown
Just what is a man to do?
Cross-process of course!

Olympus OM-1n, F.Zuiko 50mm f/1.8 & Agfacolor 200. Adox Adonal 1+50 15mins @ 20°.

Taken on 31 July 2021