I was given some very old roll film as part of my Emulsive secret santa, for which I am very grateful. It’s 620 size, so the youngest it could be is from 1995. The backing paper tells me that it’s a lot older than that.
The first roll ran through the camera OK but was very foggy and stained. This filled me with a misplaced confidence that the next roll would work just as well. It seemed to wind-on normally but when I took the exposed roll out of the camera there was a bulge on one side. It looked like a fat roll, not suprising for something this old in a camera with only the most basic attempts to keep the film plane flat. It seemed to load very quickly onto the reel, which I thought little of at the time.
It turns out that the tape holding the leading edge of the film to the backing paper had dried-up and let go. So instead of the film following the backing paper across the image plane pf the camera and around the take-up reel, it caught and started rolling-up behind the lens. At some point it must have caught again, leading to a doubled-over length of film being wound round the reel. It was pretty obvious after development that the film had been folded in half.
I have one roll of 620 film left, a lovely old example of Verichrome Pan. This too could be as recent as 1995, but I doubt it. Knowing what happened with the previous roll I loaded the camera in a dark bag. As feared, the tape holding the leading edge had fallen off. That was easily replaced with a bit of masking tape and the camera seemed to load OK.
The fun started when I tried to load the film into a reel to develop it. The trailing edge of the film – the end that you feed into the reel – was folded over by around 5mm. As soon as I tried to fold it back the film cracked and this strip fell off. This film is definitely older than 1995.
I carried on trying to load the film into the reel but it had a vicious curl from being wound around a thin 620 spool for many years. No problem: wind all of the film off the backing paper and load it from the other end. The film had other ideas. Even when I got the front edge lined-up with the entry point of the tank spiral, it tried to curl into a tube (the ‘cupping’ type curl that films like Tri-X are prone to).
So I need to find a way to get this film to relax. What I have done for now is to curl it around the centre tube in my Paterson tank to see if it will de-tension a bit. If that doesn’t work I may have to resort to soaking it and trying to load it wet into a wet spiral.
I’ll keep you posted…
UPDATE – rolling the film around the central tube of a Paterson tank and leaving it alone for a day worked! The film relaxed enough to be wound onto the reel and developed. Of course, it was so old it was totally fogged. Or fup duck, as we like to say.
Fup Duck Photography 
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