i recently acquired 10 cheap rolls of film from yahoo auctions. what's so different about this film you ask? well not much, they're all kodachrome 64 / 36 exposure colour transparency film still in the packaging and been expired for 16 years. that's right, best before june 1988. were not talking wine here so age does not improve the quality of film. even if it were frozen for those 16 years the quality must have been degraded significantly. so why buy it? because of the unpredictable results, the possibility of warped, faded, exaggerated colours duh.

little explanation on what happens to film when it ages from the jp mailing list.

unlike milk, film is actually at its perfect best peak when it hits that expired date. the manufacturers know that film might sit around in storerooms or shelves for months or even years before purchase and they also know that over time the film emulsion will shift. this shift in the emulsion is most noticeable with color film, where it goes slowly quietly gently ever so carefully to a total and complete blue. but this takes years and years. generally, this shift, within the reasonable usability of the film, is for most purposes, negligible so, anyway... in the factory, because the manufacturer knows about the shift, they set the emulsion up on this side of perfect, so that over time it will creep over and pass to that other side of perfect. either way a few months, give or take, of that expiration date is when the emulsion is at its absolute prime.

i've heard stories of big time l.a. photographers buying cases of color film and storing it in the trunk of the car so as to prematurely age it. to sweeten it as it were.

thanks to james luckett for this

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