Mystery film.
One of the joy in shooting film is that you don’t know what you’ll get ’til you develop it. Well, a couple of years ago I bought a vintage Perkeo II (pygmy in German since it so small) and it still had a Kodak film in it. Thinking nothing of it, I rolled it up and threw the film in my desk drawer – out of sight and out of mind.
Yesterday, I was looking for a paper clip and when I opened the drawer I thought maybe I should look more into this film. It turns out to be a real old Verichrome Pan film and I suspect it was from the late 50′s since that’s when it was made available.
I wasn’t really optimistic about it but I’d still want to do this carefully. I scoured the internet for development times and what I should soup it in, I had Kodak’s D-76 developer in my darkroom and that was acceptable. I knew that over developing could easily fog this film and but I wanted to make sure that it would be enough. So instead of developing it at 68 degrees F for 10 minutes, I cooled the developer down a bit to 64 degrees F and should compensate for 30% more time. However, Since I was going to continuously agitate it I opted to increase the time by %15 to 11.5 minutes instead.
After rinsing the film, I pulled it out of the tank. The film was very soft and curled like crazy, both length wise and width wise. To my excitement I was able to salvage one frame in the middle of the roll. The rest of the film was severely fogged. I hanged it with two clips on the bottom to help flatten it whilst it dried.
Here’s a negative scan of it…
It appears to be a photo of a window looking out – I can barely make out the house across the street. Talk about anticipation, this image waited 40 years to be seen. Now that’s something you can’t feel when looking at an LCD on the back of a camera!
RIP Kodak Verichrome Pan.
