Olympus Trip 35 & Fuji Superia 100 (expired 2008). Lab developed. Home scanned and converted with Negative Lab Pro.
Taken on 3 June 2025
Two lone scooters
Tag: Expired
Casino
The hotel we stayed in was close to a large casino. It’s angular construction (and the way the roof was covered with artificial turf) made for some interesting subject matter.
I didn’t actually venture inside though.
Olympus Trip 35 & Kodak Pro Image (first two pictures) / Fuji Superia 100 (expired 2008). Lab developed. Home scanned and converted with Negative Lab Pro.
Taken on May / June 2025
Leaving on a jetplane
It’s one of those cliched pictures of an aircraft wing taken through the cabin window (well, either that, or I somehow managed to climb atop the fuselage mid-flight…).
What this indicates is that I’ll soon be posting pictures from the holiday in Spain I took with my wife at the start of June. Everybody loves to see other people’s holiday snaps, right? 😉
Olympus Trip 35 & Fuji Superai 100 (expired 2008). Lab developed. Home scanned and converted with Negative Lab Pro.
Taken on 29 May 2025
A day at Yorkshire Sculpture Park (part 3)
The final batch of pictures from my Yorkshire Sculpture Park visit. As previously, I’ve added a little information about the artworks below each picture, but you can find out more at the park’s website.
Sean Henry makes detailed and life-like sculptures of anonymous figures, often in casual poses and deep in thought. They are usually based on members of the public or actors, and scaled either up or down, so they are never actually life sized. Seated Figure is a monumental 3 metres tall. The artist uses clay to model his works in the studio, before they are cast in bronze. (taken from the YSP website)
This piece can be seen from miles and has a commanding position looking out across the landscape from the top of a hill.
Charity is based on the Scope charity collection boxes that used to be common on British streets. It features a young girl wearing a calliper and cradling a teddy bear. It has a donate box asking people to ‘please give generously’. Hirst’s interpretation questions outdated ways of depicting disability and seeking charity. (taken from the YSP website)
The charity boxes that inspired this piece were a common sight when I was younger, although not with the additional flourish added by Hirst, which features the collection box pried open by a crowbar. I was amused and happy to note that crows had taken up residence within the open collection box and were carrying nesting material in there as I watched.
Damien Hirst’s The Virgin Mother stands at 10 metres tall and is the tallest sculpture at YSP. A powerful presence in the landscape, it is partly inspired by the historic sculpture Little Dancer of Fourteen Years(c.1881), by Edgar Degas. Hirst deliberately makes the materials look different than they are, for example The Virgin Mother is bronze painted to look like plastic. (taken from the YSP website)
This is a striking piece of sculpture and my picture doesn’t really give a sense of scale, with a full grown adult barely reaching the figure’s calves. It’s also slightly disturbing with the figure appearing intact from her left profile, only to reveal tissues, muscles, bone, and a fetus in her womb. Where her left hand crosses the demarcation between outside and inside, the fingers are severed.
The colossal sculpture is impressive in both scale and composition, appearing very different from every angle and continuing the theme of points that almost meet, which appears in much of Moore’s work. (taken from the YSP website)
I’d originally intended to get the whole sculpture in frame when I took this shot, but I liked how the child gave a sense of scale to the piece, so moved the viewpoint.
Yashica Mat 124G & Kodak Tmax 100 (expired 2008). Ilfotec DD-X 1+4 for 7 minutes @ 20°
Taken on 5 April 2025
A day at Yorkshire Sculpture Park (part 2)
More pictures from my Yorkshire Sculpture Park visit. Again, I’ve added a little information about the artworks below each picture, but you can find out more at the park’s website.
Made for YSP, Wall Dale Cubed uses 1000 tonnes of Yorkshire stone from a local quarry and was constructed over many weeks. Importantly to the artist, this colossal work is built in the same way throughout, which connects to ancient stone walls in Ireland, so that ‘when looking at the outside of the block, one can feel the inside without being able to see it’. (taken from the YSP website)
Kimsooja developed this elegant and towering conical sculpture in collaboration with scientists at Cornell University. The nanopolymer in which its panels are covered enhances the refractive qualities of light, giving an iridescent effect similar to that which occurs naturally on the wings of a butterfly or a beetle’s shell. It is responsive to changing light conditions and brought to life by sunlight on its surface. (taken from the YSP website)
The structure apparently has a mirrored floor which make it look like it pierces the earth below, although I didn’t walk close enough to it to see this aspect.
In Britain, folds have been made for hundreds of years as animal pens and Goldsworthy has developed the traditional fold to make contemporary sculptures. Peter’s Fold was built using drystone techniques by master wallers who have worked with the artist for many years. The Yorkshire sandstone was sourced from Hillhouse Edge Quarry in nearby Holmfirth. It is built around a common lime tree with distinctive epicormic growth, which occurs when dormant buds beneath the bark become active. (taken from the YSP website)
I decided to take the picture from a low vantage point on the grass. Unfortunately, due to the way TLR cameras work, I didn’t spot a stray blade of grass in front of the taking lens which resulted in a blurred smudge on the image. I’ve attempted to remove this and not done too bad a job (although you can probably see the joins if you look closely…)
This isn’t an actual artwork, but this lone tree stump surrounded by daffodils looked pretty photogenic, so here it is, in amongst it’s more famous fellow park residents.
Yashica Mat 124G & Kodak Tmax 100 (expired 2008). Ilfotec DD-X 1+4 for 7 minutes @ 20°
Taken on 5 April 2025
A day at Yorkshire Sculpture Park (part 1)
Back in April I took a trip to the Yorkshire Sculpture Park. The venue features indoor gallery spaces, but also a significant landscaped outdoor park dating to the 18th century. Throughout the park are an large array of sculpture and artworks of varying styles, types, designs, and sizes.
On this visit I took my trusty Yashica Mat 124G and a (potentially less trustworthy) roll of expired Kodak Tmax 100 film that had been sat in the freezer for several years. As you can see, there was no need to worry about the condition of the film, which has produced lovely results.
I shot the whole roll at the park and will post the pictures over the next few days. I’ve added a little information about the artworks below each picture, but you can find out more at the park’s website.
This huge, 5-metre tall bronze sculpture is very striking. It forms part of a series titled Intermediaries that take South Indian golu dolls as their starting point. These small, colourful clay figurines that are displayed in homes as part of the Navaratri festival depict gods and goddesses, animals and people.
There are three of these figures gathered together, titled Riace II, III, & IV (although only two of them feature in my picture – I don’t know which ones).
The Riace figures are inspired by the 5th century BCE bronze sculptures that were rediscovered in the sea off the coast of the Riace region of Italy in 1972. Frink said ‘the original figures are very beautiful, but also very sinister, and that is what they are supposed to be’.
The black and white picture, while pleasing, doesn’t really do justice to the bold colours that make up the mosaic surfaces of the figure.
Known as the Lady Hare – which Ryder describes a companion for the Minotaur – the work combines a female body with the head of a hare, a mystical creature in folklore.
Yashica Mat 124G & Kodak Tmax 100 (expired 2008). Ilfotec DD-X 1+4 for 7 minutes @ 20°
Taken on 5 April 2025
Expiryment #6: Kodak Elite Chrome 200 (expired 2003)
I’ve been meaning to write this post for a week or so now and have already posted a few pictures from this roll, but here is the bona-fide “Expiryment”.
This time around, I had a roll of Kodak Elite Chrome 200 which had expired in 2003. It’s not the first.time I’ve shot a roll of this film from this vintage, although I didn’t write anything specific about it at the time apart from how well I thought it had held up.
Given the nice results I got last time, I was fairly confident that I would have a similar experience this time around too. Alas, it wasn’t quite the same and, although the two rolls were the same brand, the same age, and had been stored in the same way since I acquired them, this time I encountered some problems.
My chosen method for shooting slide film is to expose it at box speed, no matter how expired it is. While expired reversal film usually benefits from extra light in the form of exposure, slide film seems to maintain its original narrow exposure latitude and any significant deviation from this will quickly result in blown highlights or crushed shadows. Of course, while the latitude may remain the same, this doesn’t mean that other things haven’t changed, and the dyes can degrade, resulting in colour shifts. This is what had happened with this roll.
Upon receiving the sheet of positives back from the lab they looked fine on initial inspection (holding them up to the window), but it quickly became apparent that all was not well when I began to scan them. A very noticeable purple cast was visible on the images, particularly where there were underexposed shadows.
Thankfully, despite the problems with the colour, modern technology is able to come to the rescue, and with some careful editing in Adobe Lightroom (mostly using he colour curves adjustments), I was able to remove the bulk of the purple caste and get relatively pleasing results. The image comparison slider below shows a good example of the before and after states of one of the images.
Some images fared worse than others, but none were a complete write off due to the colour issues – the ones I didn’t upload to Flickr were as a result of other, more mundane problems, such as soft focus or them just being photos I thought were uninteresting.
A selection of other shots from the roll are below, all after post-processing to remove the colour cast.
Overall then, while there was a definite issue present for this roll, it wasn’t insurmountable, and post-processing produced very acceptable results. I wouldn’t want to risk shooting film like this for something important, but for the fun of it, sure, and I still have plenty of expired rolls left (including some more Elite Chrome in both 100asa and 200asa variants). Further Expiryments to come…
Overall outcome: Partial success!
Olympus OM-10 & G.Zuiko 35mm f/2.8 on Kodak Elite Chrome 200 (expired 2004) . Lab developed. Home scanned and converted with Negative Lab Pro.
Taken on 5 October 2024
Other posts in the Expiriment series:
Expiryment #1: Ilford HP5 (expired 1982)
Expiryment #2: Kodacolor VR400 (expired 1989)
Expiryment #3: Truprint FG+ (expired 2003)
Expiryment #5: Kodak Vericolor HC (expired 1992)
It’s been a while since the last one of these posts, but with a shorter gap than before – 7 months this time, as opposed to the 17 month gap between the last two Expiriment posts.
This time, the subject was a roll of Kodak Vericolor HC which had expired in 1992. I have no idea of the entire provenance of the film before I got it, although it’s been in my freezer for about three years now.
Kodak describes Vericolor HC as follows:
KODAK VERICOLOR HC
Professional Film
This improved color negative film has greater sharpness and finer grain than KODAK VERICOLOR II Commercial Film, Type S.
This film is ideal for commercial illustration, industrial applications, low-level aerial photography, environmental portraiture, and other applications that call for increased contrast. It may also be used for any copy work that needs increased contrast, and for outdoor portraiture under low-contrast lighting conditions, such as on cloudy days or in deep shade.
FEATURES
• Extremely fine grain, extremely high sharpness, and high resolving power
• Built-in dye mask
• Balanced for exposure by daylight, blue flash, or electronic flash
• Designed for processing in Process C-41 chemicals
BENEFITS
• Produces excellent-quality high-contrast prints even with a high degree of enlargement
• Makes excellent-quality color reproduction possible without supplementary masking
• Allows exposures from 1/ 10 second to 1/10,000 second without filters
• Can be processed with KODACOLOR and other KODAK VERICOLOR Films
I took a different approach when shooting this time. Usually I only have a single roll of a particular expired film and tend to take a chance and shoot the whole roll with the same settings, without any bracketing. This going-for-bust approach risks disaster if I misjudge the settings, but the reward is a full set of different images if it works well, rather than a curtailed set of identical compositions taken at different shutter speeds.
This time though, I decided to take the cautious apoproach. The primary reason for this being that I have an entire pro-pack of the film so using one roll as a sacrifice would mean I can shoot the other four knowing what settings will work well. In order to still maximise the number of different compositions, I chose to shoot the roll with my Bronica ETRSi, which gives me 15 shots per roll of 120 film. I decided to shoot each composition at three settings, allowing me five different compositions from the roll.
I didn’t see any point in shooting any of the shots at box speed, so planned on shooting each composition at one, two, and three stops of overexposure. As the film is rated at a box speed of 100asa, I chose to set my light meter to 64asa as a baseline, take a reading for the composition, and then shoot two additional frames with an increase of one stop of exposure for each. That was the plan, at least…
This plan worked ok for the first shot, and the results can be seen below, withe the first image shot at the settings given for 64asa, and the following two images with a stop more exposure over the previous one:
Fot this first shot, the results were all good. The middle image (effectively shot at 32asa) is the one I prefer. The first doesn’t show any major issues with underexposure, although the sky is a bit deeper, and the third, while clearly brighter, is still very acceptable (and I would have been perfectly happy with it if I didn’t have the others to compare it to).
The results were similar for these shots of a willow tree:
Again, the middle image is the best exposed, I think.
The next six shots had an issue – not only did I tamper with the process by changing lenses, I also managed to somehow mess up the metering – shooting each shot at box speed, then one and two stops over for both these compositions. While this was an error, it just means that the best exposed image is now number three, with the fist shot in each sequence being at actual box speed for the film. It clearly shows problems rated at box speed in terms of underexposure.
—
For the final composition I realised my error and got back on track. The middle shot again being the best exposed.
Beyond the issues with underexposure and some small spotty defects in the emulsion, the results are pretty outstanding for a film that expired over thirty years ago. The colours still look very nice too.
I feel confident that, if I meter for 32asa, that I can expect pretty good results from the remaining four rolls I have, although I’ll perhaps overexpose a little more in dim conditions.
Overall outcome: Success!
Expiriment #6 coming soon (I do actually have some more expired film I’ve shot recently, so this might actually be true)…
Bronica ETRS1, Kodak Vericolor HC (expired 1992). Shot bracketed and lab developed for box speed. Home scanned and converted with Negative Lab Pro.
Taken on 11 November 2024
I’ve uploaded the images above directly to my blog, but if you want to see the ones with the best exposure at higher resolution, they can be found here on my Flickr account.
Other posts in the Expiriment series:
Expiriment #1: Ilford HP5 (expired 1982)
Expiriment #2: Kodacolor VR400 (expired 1989)
Expiryment #4: Kodak Portra 400NC (expired 2007)
Despite my hopes and promises of doing one of these posts each month, I seem to have failed miserably when it comes to doing so – the last post in this (very occasional!) series was back in November 2022.
I did shoot another roll of expired film last summer but I was unhappy with the results and ended up converting the pictures to black and white. While they looks pretty nice after the conversion, these posts are aimed to be about keeping to the original results from the film used with a minimum of post processing. Converting to monochrome was a step too far.
No such worries with the next roll though, some 120 format Kodak Portra 400NC that expired in 2007. 2007 doesn’t feel like that long ago but it was prior to the global financial crisis and is fast approaching twenty years ago!
Portra 400NC was discontinued by Kodak in 2010, when the current range of Porta films (160, 400, and 800) was introduced. Kodaks description of 400NC was: “Offers fine grain, low contrast, and colors and skin tones that look real and natural in a variety of lighting situations.” There is a brochure online on Kodak’s website which covers the full rang of (as was) Portra films from this period. There’s a strong hint that it was aiming for the wedding photography market…
I don’t photograph weddings and, even if I did, there’s no way I’d risk a seventeen year old expired roll of unknown provenance on such a once-in-a-lifetime event. For the sort of subjects I normally photograph however, I was willing to take the risk.
Despite the limited number of shots, I decided to shoot it with my Fujica GW690 6×9 medium format camera, giving me just eight potential pictures from the roll. The first outing was to my favourite seaside haunt of Mablethorpe. Normally when I visit Mablethorpe I will wander around all day making photographs. However, this year, I took my dad along for a day out, so knew from the outset that I wouldn’t be shooting as much. In the even I only used three frames on this outing, and one of those was a misfire when the camera was in my bag! I’ve since started to avoid winding the film in the GW690 after taking a shot to prevent this expensive mistake from reoccurring. Unfortunately, the Mk I GW690 that I own doesn’t have the shutter button lock that the later models do.
So the first two shots from the roll were of beach chalets / huts that stand along the beach promenade. The weather on the day was bright, but a layer of thin high-level cloud, robbed the light of contrast. Nevertheless, for outdated film the results were pretty good.
The second batch of shots – the remaining five on the roll – were shot one misty morning at Rother Valley Country Park. While I find the park a little uninspiring due to over-familiarity, cold misty morning usually provide some nice pictures, and this occasion bore that out.
The first shot is a little dull perhaps, but the light was nice. It’s just a suburban street I walked on my way to the park. You can just make out the mist hanging over where the lake is in the middle of the shot though. There’s a line of pylons that run between the houses and the park. The towers are out of frame, but the powerlines themselves can be seen.
The next shot is one of my favourites from last year, a beautifully autumnal scene of a small maple tree, it’s leaves turning but not yet fallen, nicely separated from the background by the mist. I’m not sure if the colours are true to life, but they look gorgeous, so I’ll take that as a win.
The mist was already burning off under the gaze of the morning sunshine when I took the next picture. A simple landscape scene of the lake with the boating centre on the far bank. There’s still enough mist left to provide some pleasant atmosphere to the photo though.
I took another photo very similar to the one above which had a couple of swans in the frame, but the one above is the best, I think.
The last shot is another lone tree, but this time I shot directly into the light. It’s not as good as the other tree picture, but I do like the way the tufts of dew and cobweb covered grass are illuminated at the bottom of the frame. The lens of the GW690 shows no signs of flare, even in this challenging scene.
So, apart from a wasted shot, this was another expired film success. When I shoot old colour film I’m not really expecting accurate colours, just pleasing ones, and this delivered on that.
Overall outcome: Success!
Expiriment #5 coming soon (Yeah, I know…)…
Fujica GW690, Kodak Portra 400NC (expired 2007). Shot at 160asa and lab developed for box speed. Home scanned and converted with Negative Lab Pro.
Taken on 30 September and 25 October 2023
Other posts in the Expiriment series:
Expiriment #1: Ilford HP5 (expired 1982)
More construction
Another new building project takes shape on Paternoster Row, near Sheffield Midland railway station. I don’t know what this will be, but I won’t be surprised to discover that it’s something else to do with the university.
Canon Sure Shot Supreme. Fujichrome Provia 100 (expiry unknown). Lab developed. Home scanned.
Taken 25 March 2023.
Steel City Snapper photography 