Expired in 1938

I have a small archive of old Kodak Verichrome roll film I acquired some years ago. The rolls are all exposed and stored in original boxes:

DASCO bakelite and the Langoliers

DASCO was (and the one above still is) a bakelite toy camera from 40s.
It is, in essence, a cheap piece of pressed plastic with few little metal and glass pieces.
It was made for 127 roll film.
The roll I found inside is Kodak Verichrome Pan. Kodak VP came out in mid-50s.
After the development, a few frames emerged: people, trees, automobiles.
Ah, 50s indeed (look at the cars and the hat):

Model A from Missouri

Univex model A was a camera. A very small camera.
Here is one, next to my "Zorki 5":



Three ounces of Bakelite with a bit of glass and a few metal parts.
It was very popular among girls in early 30s, because it was cheap.
Really cheap. Seriously cheap.
Here is the page of the Official Girl Scout catalog, year 1933:



It is called there "A New Camera" with a price tag of 35 cents.
35 cents! For the price, it was not too bad.
Unlike some other cameras (Japanese "Hit", for one) it could actually take a picture.
Sometimes adults used it, but most of the Univex's users were kids.
The idea of the Univex enterprise was to make money selling film, not camera.
The proprietary Univex 00 film model A ate had been manufactured by Gevaert in Belgium.
The idea worked: Univex sold millions of ugly ducklings until 1940, when Belgium went under and suddenly 00 film was no more.
That was the end of Model A.
End of story.
I received mine from a village in rural Missouri. It had exposed roll of 00 waiting inside:

118 Kodak Verichrome roll from 1940s

I received these rolls from a antique dealer in Fayetteville, North Carolina with 2 other rolls and spools of different vintage.The roll in the center never been exposed; the yellow color film (right) was empty. So what's left is this big bad spool of 118 Kodak Verichrome.118 format roll film was introduced by Kodak in 1900 and discontinued in 1961 but it was not in wide use after early 40s because the cameras made for this film format were out of production by 1930s.
I did my usual tests and developed the roll; a face appeared from the wet darkness:

Brownie Vecta from UK

I received this camera from the village North of Manchester, UK
Small Kodak Brownie Vecta had been in production from 1963 to 1966
Like many other brownies, it has dark lens and one shutter speed, not much to talk about.
This one had film inside, 127 Kodacolor II, exposed.
I developed the film as B&W just because silver survives the ordeal of time much better then the color dyes.

Leica Camera Russia blog on my Found Film project (Russian)

http://blog.leica-camera.ru/2014/05/15/19242/

A Bigger Globe

Do you know that inside the Earth there's another, a much bigger globe? I leaned this long time ago from "The Good Soldier Švejk" by Jaroslav Hašek, the book I love dearly.
All the years since I've got this piece of knowledge in my head, I had been looking for the unknown world, and finally, I discovered it. It's happened in 2007. I found this world, this another Earth in the photographs taken but never brought to light, left in the darkness, photographs on the old films forgotten in the vintage cameras, cameras shoved into nameless darkness of countless attics or garages. And if you think this another world is small and unimportant one, if you think that the so called "present" is much bigger entity, think again, because neither one is actually exists in the place I am sharing with you. Both of them, the "present" you know as you personal instant history, and the latent flickering-smoldering-glowing in the darkness possibilities of images somewhere on the forgotten rolls, both are equally non-existent, and as such, they are zeros, nihils, nones. They are the same. And the one I am talking about here may be even bigger, much bigger;-)
At least, it has surely became bigger last week, when I decided to develop the old Brownie-type roll I received from ebay seller in Alabama.
Well, what could be on the old roll from Heavenwood, Alabama? Most likely its...let me guess...Heavenwood, Alabama! Old cameras and old undeveloped films rarely travel long distances. Treated as sentimental artifacts of little significance at best or as something very close to the junk cluttering living space, they usually thrown away in storage until the end of times.
But, something very different emerged from the wet darkness of my tiny darkroom. I developed the roll in cold concentrated Dektol developer and got several low contrast but otherwise legible images, five frames total:

Shadows of shadows, shells of shells

Here they are, 116 format rolls I recently received from Oregon.
Agfa D6 rolls on the spools with wooden stem, bigger then the 120, nitrate-based (i.e. flammable).
All three -- exposed, and in dated boxes:

Two Stories Plus X

I have little archive of five old undeveloped rolls I received from the ebay seller in Rochester, NY; there were 3 separate auctions somewhere in 2010; so I developed the rolls in 3 batches with the last one done just recently. Let's start with the first 2 rolls I developed in the first batch --
..........................................................................................................Here they are, the two 620 Plux-X rolls of intense green:



The condition could be better: the hardest rolls to separate from backing paper so far; I had to tear the paper to pieces and still some of it stayed, glued to the film.
The film itself was alive as quick test revealed; developed it at 40F/4.5C in 12% HC-110.
Here is the piece of developed film caught on camera before scanning:



Frame numbers got themselves happily transferred to the emulsion; there are dead round yellow spots where emulsion touched the hot metal of the spool's rusty cheeks and holes, holes, holes...the roll must had been stored in the attic or garage for ages, where it became really hot in the summers.

Still, there were some recoverable images:

Boy scouts from Brownie Six-20 flash

I found this camera on *bay in 2010. I have the record somewhere. I know I received it from Springfield, Oregon. It had exposed roll of 620 Kodak film in it; I bought it because of this forgotten, never developed film. I thought I developed it long time ago, there in 2010, and that it was empty. It was clear case of a false memory: while recently giving the camera to a friend as a present, I checked what's inside (good habit!) and presto! It was sitting there, red roll of 620 Kodak Verichrome Pan.
Verichrome Pan is relatively new film, it went on sale in 1956. So these are late 50s or 60s:

Curious case of double exposure

Here, pictured in the uncut grass of my backyard, sits Brownie camera I received last February from *bay seller. It is ancient No 2A model from the early 20s. This very simple box camera has one speed rotary-type shutter and 3 Waterstop apertures...that's it. I bought is because there was a roll of exposed film inside. The film turned out to be a 116 Kodak Verichrome Pan. Now, Verichrome Pan is later film, went on sale in mid-50s. It is also known for preserving the latent image very well. So, 4 minutes in very cold and very active developer and...

A120 Brownie film from 20s developed

I received this from Eagle River, WI: (2) two glass tubes with Kodak developer and (1)roll of antique Kodak A120-6 Brownie film on (equally antique) wooden spool.
Now, for the record: this is not the best way to store film!
"A" in the film's name has a meaning: it is an "Autographic" type of film. This type of roll film had additional copy paper layer providing photographer an opportunity to write notes on the film using small metal stylus at the time of the exposure.
This additional paper layer is good for the preservation; films of this type are usually survive longer than the rest of the pack, this one is no exclusion from the rule: been cellulose nitrate-based film, it is not supposed to be in a good shape at all, but it is.
I checked the copy paper layer after I rolled the film into the developing spiral -- no, no luck, no notes.
I developed the film in cold (42F) concentrated (10%) Kodak HC-110 developer for 5min 30sec, as development tests suggested. Three (out of six) frames survived:

The Box Of Darkness

This is brownie-style Agfa camera (B2-Cadet).
I found exposed roll of Kodak Verichrome Pan film inside and developed it.
There were 4 frames on the film:

柯達 Verichrome在一個盒子裡與到期日期1943年12月

Yes that's right -- just what's the subject says -- 120 Kodak Verichrome in a box with the expiration date of December 1943. I received it from a seller in a village in Northern Illinois and were hoping for the images from... a village in Northern Illinois (or Chicago, if the stars are gracious), but something completely different came out of my darkroom's wet darkness:

75-years old film developed

Found this roll exposed at the usual internet dump.
It is Kodak Non-curling, the most popular roll film type before Verichrome.
This one dated Oct 1935 - at least 75 years past the expiration date.
Non-curling is nitrate-based meaning it supposed to be extinct by now but because both sides are coated with gelatin, the condition of the base is better then average.
The emulsion was still responding to developer and I souped it for 4 min in 10% HC-110 at 44F/7C.
The beginning of the roll was infected with light as well as few frames at the end; 4 out of 8 frames partially survived:

Film found in Vilia Auto camera: The last days of the Soviet Union

This is not my camera/film. It was published »here by the Live Journal user »zuborobo
He found this film sitting exposed for almost 20 years inside P&S camera Vilia-Auto.
Year 1991, the last days of the Soviet Union, simple people, hard life -- vodka, crumpled spaces of the soviet era flat, heavy everyday drinking so common for the people of Russia then and today (today even more as I heard).
All too familiar.
BTW we had the same model gas water heater as the one in the picture above.
Author had the funny story invented to accompany the pictures with names etc which I have no intention to translate: the pictures tell so much more.

Found film photography: Moscow and Muscovites

Few years back I have started my "found film" project. It has started from the old folding "Life-O-Rama" camera with the roll of film forgotten inside by the previous owner. There were few pictures on the roll, dated probably late 90s, i.e. not very old, but I started looking for the old cameras with film inside. Now, after hundreds of cameras/developed rolls of film I still can't stop doing this.

The pictures from these rolls are often related to each other, they form stories, they can be explained, speculated on, dated, placed on the map etc.

The most intriguing part of course is who took them, who was the photographer, why they were not developed and all this story of camera with film sleeping for so long in some mystic fold of Times.

From now on, I will be publishing some of my findings here. Just look for the 'found film stories' tag. Here is the last one: