Expired in 1947 and exposed in 2008!
The above photo is one of the photos recently taken on a lot of old expired Ansco Plenachrome black and white film. I purchased the lot from eBay and it contained 20 or so boxes of 120 film with expiration dates of 1947 and 1949. Not sure what to expect, I loaded up a roll into my recently acquired Zeiss Super Ikonta C (circa 1942) and found out that the two were a match made in heaven!
Apparently this film was originally rated at a speed of 125. However, after a bit of research I found most people were having luck shooting old film like this more around speeds of 50.
After exposing, I went down to the lab with my changing bag, tank+reel, and a bottle of Ilfosol S and Ilford Rapid fixer. Here is where things got interesting in processing this film. The most unexpected thing happened not during processing, but while loading the film. I have a JOBO tank+reel which are usually no problem to load. The only hiccup is that from time to time, the sharp corners on the leading edge of the film will catch in the ribs that support the reel’s spiral track. However, with careful/slow loading this can usually be avoided. So, I unrolled the film off the spool and knew right away I was going to be in for a fight. Film that has been wound around a tight spool for 60+ years has a tendency—a very strong tendency to want to stay wound at that same size. After quite a bit of coaxing and loading/re-loading, I was able to finally get this film on the reel and process the film. I found that developing it in Ilfosol S at 68 deg. for about 17 minutes produced fairly good results.
The mood and tone created by the base fog and cosmic ray artifacts are outstanding. Again, another great example of the richness of handmade organic processes and the value of exploring aged media.