Recently I found a box full of unexposed 35 mm black and white film rolls from a photo class I took in college. They’re about 10 years old. I popped one in my camera and shot it, but haven’t developed it yet. Can I expect to get decent quality pictures?
B&W photos, on a basic level anyway, are just light and dark areas, so you don’t have the issue that you do with old color film creating weird hues. But will the emulsion on the film have gone through any sort of reaction that will the cause the pictures to not turn out fine?
Unless you run your own film, you can expect to have difficulty in finding anyone to process it.
My experience has been that unless the film was exposed to light (such as a leaky bulk-loader or a leaky camera back) it will be acceptable. The contrast might be a bit flatter, but you should be able to accommodate that in printing.
The only real difficulty I could envision might be if the emulsion dried out over those ten years, but we’ve come a fair way from the days of fairly unrefined hoof-based gelatin on acetate, so it’s pretty durable stuff.
Old film tends to get “slower” (i.e., lower effective ISO) so you might try exposing 100 speed film at 50 (400 at 200, etc).
If you develop yourself, you might also add a couple of minutes of developing time.
You should also prepare yourself for seeing a lot more flannel than you’re currently used to.
Sorry, the film is unexposed
I submit that old film will color the scene in the style of the time period in which it was made. The reason it is impossible to find any film from the 80s is because it was destroyed by judicial fiat. 70s film is impossible to find because everyone wanted to know what they’d look like with gigantic bushy mustaches and those enormous sunglasses.