Ilford HP4 (1976)

This is aptly tagged “extreme lomography” and it’s not exaggerated.

A couple of months ago I found 3 Ilford HP4 expired in 1976 inside an old plastic drawer cabinet, together with other less useful photography related things, in a church my family is currently using as a lumber room (no question, please). My father used to be a hobbyist shooter when he was in his 20’s – I would say mostly thanks to my grandpa’s money then to his own talent, but that’s a story for another blog. I decided to test one of these old boys in the Ricoh compact, foreseeing that the camera would shoot at iso 100 because there’s no DX code printed on the shell. And pulling from iso 400 to 100 is a good thing with a film so old. Unfortunately a 2 stop underexposure is absolutely not enough with a film so old! The rule of thumb is in fact to underexpose 1 stop every 10 years from the expiration date, so I should’ve underexposed 4 stops, that is shooting at iso 25. Long story short: what a mess! If you look at the film strip is a bit dark, probably because of fogging, but with poor apparent contrast. Grain is over-the-top and that’s glaring if you look at the scans. On the other hand, the “mood” transferred on the images because of film age combined with my errors is not bad at all, eventually funny when you read the date impressed by the camera itself. They seem like very old pictures and then you realize they are from last month.