Rummaging around in the back of an oft-neglected closet, I found an old roll of Kodak Ektachrome color slide film. It expired in 1997.
I’ve got plenty of old film cameras gathering dust in the same closet, so I think I’ll run it through one of them and try to find someplace to process it. I assume I’ll get some bizarre anomalies. Anyone have any suggestions as to what I should photograph with it? If I knew what kind of image aberrations to expect, I’d try to match that to the subject matter, but I haven’t a clue.
Thanks for any suggestions!
Push it two stops, for starters. The colors will probably be decent, provided the film has not been overly abused in storage. Don’t be surprised if it’s on the grainy side. Stashed way in the closet is probably OK, but in the attic would not be so good.
The other condition is that you get it processed right. It’s probably E6, which is not something the local drugstore can handle, so you’ll probably have to mail it off to someone that can process it.
Find a BIG lab that still has fresh chemicals.
Ektachrome still had a bluish cast at that time, if I recall correctly. So be prepared for it to be a bit colder than you’re used to nowadays. Otherwise, I don’t think you’ll see anything unusual in the images.
Perhaps one retro use would be to shoot it indoors under tungsten light for that yellow glow that we’ve (thankfully) forgotten in the era of white-balanced digital images. Tungsten is pretty aggressively yellow, but halogen can just be a nice warmth. Fluorescent was big trouble, especially for Ektachrome. BLUUUUUUE.