One of the first rolls I ever shot in my first (and only) SLR was SeattleFilmWorks 200. I bought an assortment of expired film rolls off of Ebay, then dig some digging and discovered one of them was a roll I actually wouldn’t be able to process at my usual lab.
Seattle FilmWorks has a pretty interesting history as a company. They claimed their film needed a proprietary development technique, and wound up getting sued because that was a big fat lie. According to Wikipedia, they were repackaging cinema film (which couldn’t be processed in C-41 due to the Remjet layer), and then later on started repackaging C-41 film. I’m not sure which kind I had. My negatives are pretty dark (and I can’t see anything written along the rebate), but there’s a pretty good reason for them to be dense that’ll become clear shortly.
Once I found a mail-in lab that would process it, I grabbed my Elan 7 and set it to manual mode for the very first time! This roll was at least a couple decades expired, so I did the old “One stop per decade” technique and rated it at 50. Was this the right choice?
…Absolutely not. I’d definitely aim for 100-200 if I shot this again. Maybe the roll I had was stored surprisingly well. Luckily, most of the rest of the roll is less migraine-inducing.
I actually quite like the above shot. The highlights are still cooked, but the color palette is nice- almost the kind of pastels you get from intentional overexposure.
You’ll have to forgive some of my focusing issues. I was three months into this hobby and three rolls into this camera.
I can never resist a pigeon photo. The definition in these is pretty much nonexistent, though. This was before I started editing my photos, so maybe I could’ve fixed them up a bit.
No highlight or shadow detail on these gourds, but at least there’s enough natural contrast here that they’re still pleasant to look at. But onto the important stuff…
As I was attempting to take an artsy photo of some dried cornstalks, I found a hidden friend! I’m actually glad I overexposed here- since the pigeon was in shadow, I suspect I’d’ve lost all detail if I’d exposed properly. That third shot is probably my favorite of the roll; I love the way the cornstalks frame the bird.
I only had a couple frames left, so of course I spent them on this handsome critter. Despite the color shifts that you’d expect from expired color film, you can still make out the metallic purple and green feathers on its neck.
This roll didn’t come out how I expected, but to be fair, I had no idea what to expect from it. I wouldn’t go out of my way to shoot SeattleFilmWorks again, but at least if I stumble upon another roll, I’ll have a better idea how to handle it.
My biggest takeaway, though, was that I should take more photos of pigeons.
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