I like shopping for classic cameras, I suppose — I must, given how many web sites I frequent, just seeing what I can find, and at what price point. So it was a few weeks back when I was on shopgoodwill.com, the online auction site for numerous Goodwill Industries chapters through the US and Canada. The site has myriad camera listings, but most of the merchandise is, candidly, not that desirable to me. Still, I look from time-to-time, which is how I found an interesting listing, for a not-so-interesting camera.
The camera? Just a Kodak Duaflex IV, a basic box camera from the late 1950s:
What caught my eye wasn’t so much the Duaflex IV, although it seemed to be a nice one. (I love my simple old Duaflex II, which was also my very first camera as a kid.) If you look closely as the small screen shot above, you’ll see two rolls of film: one that’s exposed and sealed, and another that’s still in its box. Those two things alone were enough to make me start the bidding for this item at US$10 — which was also sufficient to win the otherwise relatively undesirable listing.
On a recent Sunday, FedEx delivered the box from Goodwill of North Central Wisconsin, in Appleton. I extracted the two rolls of film, and put the entirety of the rest of it on my work bench so I could give the Duaflex IV a good clean before adding it to the camera collection. (Information about that will come later.)
For all I know, someone got the camera back in 1959 or early 1960, bought two rolls of film, shot one, never processed it, and it all went in a box until it was donated to Goodwill 60 years later; that’s certainly how it appears. The camera was dirty, but only on the top surfaces, suggesting that perhaps it was sitting on a shelf for a very long time. It’s obviously impossible to know anything with certainty.
The film rolls were both Kodak Verichrome Pan, in 620 format, the size required by the Duaflex. The unopened roll, I learned, was marked with a June 1961 expiration date:
There’s no way to know for certain, but I would have to imagine that the exposed roll is the same age:
While I may shoot the sealed roll, I was particularly intrigued by the exposed one, and couldn’t wait to get it into my darkroom for processing.
Processing the Film
That itself was a bit of a challenge. Or, more specifically, getting it onto a Paterson reel for developing was the challenge, taking me over half an hour of fiddling in complete darkness to get the job done. The issue? A roll of film that’s been rolled very tightly for 60 years doesn’t have a very strong desire to do anything other than remain tightly rolled. But after numerous attempts, I finally managed to get the film onto the reel, and secured into the developing tank.
In anticipation of receiving this roll, I did some homework on processing found films. My first thought was to use stand processing, where a very dilute developer is used over an extended period. Kodak HC-110, my preferred general purpose developer, is an excellent choice for stand developing, although to date, I’ve never attempted stand or semi-stand developing myself. I assumed it would be a good pick, because the same dilution and timing can be used with virtually any film type or speed with suitable results.
However, I also read that base fog can be worsened with stand development, and in fact it was thus not a wise choice for an aged, found film. (Base fog is caused by low levels of radioactive material in the environment — present since the dawn of the nuclear age — that slowly fog photosensitive materials over time.)
Stumbling upon Alex Luyckx’s post on expired Verichrome, I decided to take a different approach. While Alex wasn’t using 60-year-old Verichrome (his was considerably newer stock), I decided I’d simply try his suggested Dilution H for 8 minutes, 30 seconds, and see what happened.
When I first pulled the reel from the tank, I was, however, quite disappointed; it seemed solid gray, with no images visible; I didn’t even bother shaking the excess moisture off the reel as I normally do prior to pulling the film out, since it was apparent the film was trash. But as I pulled the film, I learned otherwise. Indeed, there they were: images!
Whoever shot this roll appeared not to really know what they were doing with the camera. The processed roll had only seven properly exposed images, one of which suffered from a very bad case of camera shake. One image was blank, and there were four sequential images that were pretty much solid gray, with only slight evidence of images hiding in the background. That solid gray portion of the film would have been at the beginning of the roll given how it came out of the reel, which is curious; I originally suspected that perhaps the last part of the exposed roll had been opened and fogged, but again, given its position, it’s hard to know how it ended-up that way. (The film rebate identifies only “Kodak Safety Film” and does not contain any frame numbering.)
The Results
I was, honestly, surprised to find usable images on the roll. If this had been a fresh roll of film, I would have judged the density to be very poor. But given its presumed age, I was ecstatic that I had anything on the film, and I was fairly certain that I would be able to produce acceptable scans from them. I was right.
Clearly, the film has some base fogging. I’m no expert on found film, I just would have assumed that the fogging would have been worse. There’s some peculiar patterning on the film edges as well, and some of the images suffer some clear emulsion damage of some sort.
The film curled badly after drying, so to scan these images, they were secured to a piece of glass, then placed onto the scanner bed for scanning. They were then cropped, and as I do with my own film scans, I did some mild retouching in Photoshop using a digitizing tablet to remove dust, scratches, and to minimize other types of flaws I found. I also adjusted brightness and contrast somewhat to make the most of them. But in general, I’d describe these images as “minimally processed.”
All in all, it was a delight to open this time capsule, and now, you can view its contents with me.
I think you’ll agree that for such an old roll of film, and sort of grabbing at straws in terms of how to process it, it came out remarkably well. I still wonder why this roll wasn’t developed long, long ago.
As for the Unshot Roll…
As mentioned earlier, there’s a sealed box of 60-year-old Verichrome Pan in 620 format in my possession, and the question now becomes: What do I do with it?
Of course, it’s tempting to try shooting it to see what happens. But most sources advise over-exposing expired film, and I’ve read that the general rule of thumb is to compensate one stop more exposure for every decade of age. But this film is so old, that would mean shooting it at an impossibly slow ISO equivalent. There’s no possibility for a “do-over,” so it would involve taking a calculated risk on how to expose it, and being open to not getting anything out of the film.
Additionally, this is 620 film, and I have precisely two 620 cameras: The Duaflex IV that came with this package of film, and the Duaflex II that was my first film camera at (as near as I can calculate) age 12. Neither has any ability to control exposure, so neither seems very viable for the job.
One option would be to do the reverse of what I normally do with these cameras. Instead of respooling 120 film onto a 620 core so I can shoot the cameras, I could take 620 film and respool onto a 120 core so I could shoot it in a camera with full exposure control. Alas, that doesn’t seem appealing, or particularly worth doing.
So as I close this article, I think the 60-year-old roll of Verichrome will remain merely a conversation piece, it’s 39¢ price tag a reminder that film used to be cheap. (In truth, 39¢ in 1959 is about US$3.50 in today’s money, so film hasn’t increased in price in real terms all that much.) But, I reserve the right to reconsider…
