Monday, March 16, 2009

Unknown treasures lurk on this spent roll of 620

A few weeks ago Shari over at inherdarkroom.blogspot.com posted about buying a camera and finding a roll of film still in it. Well, imagine my surprise when the Kodak Duaflex II I bought off ebay arrived with an old roll of Kodak 620 film in it all used up. You can read about Sheri's discovery here, and you can see the results of the film she got back from the lab here.

The film that Shari found in her camera was at least 20 years old (they stopped making Kodacolor VR back in '86) and unfortunately no images were visible on the film when it came back. Kodacolor-X 620 film stopped being produced a decade earlier in 1974. My roll has been sitting in the body of that Duaflex II for at least since back then, so I am not really hopefull that anything will come back off the negatives. I'm still going to try though.

The kodacolor-x film uses an old process for development - C-22. I am going to a local lab today to drop it off and they'll be mailing it out. Turn around time is about 3 weeks they said, and it's not cheap to develop. It's gonna be a long 3 weeks.

I'm hoping that we'll find some old pictures of the fake lunar landing soundstage, or maybe see who the second shooters were on that grassy knoll, but if anything does come back it'll probably be Jimmy's 4th birthday or some artsy night photos of ferris wheels... wait a minute!

If you're interested in what 620 film (on the left) looks like compared to 120, here's a photo (iPhone quality, so please forgive me):





UPDATE!
The lab wanted $55 to send it out and get it processed. That's a little steep. Gonna scour the web to see if there are any alternatives. All I want is negatives, no prints. If you know of a place, drop me a comment?

UPDATE #2!
Shari over at inHERdarkroom.blogspot.com posted a couple links in the comments, one of them with options for labs that might do C-22 processing. So I sent a note to film rescue and it looks like they'll be able to process it for $17 and they'll even scan the negs and let me preview them over the web before sending them back. The return shipping is $8 so if the negatives come back with images on them it'll only cost me $25, if the roll is bunk I'm only out $17. Only down side is that the turn around is probably 4 weeks, but for that savings ($25 vs. $55) I'll wait. Thanks again Shari!!

4 comments:

Unknown said...

Fascinating! I'll be waiting to hear if you find any hidden treasures.

inHERdarkroom said...

What??? $55. Wow. Think of how many cheap cameras that could buy you! I do hope you find a developer and it doesn't cost you a fortune. I'll be looking around for you, too. Exciting!

inHERdarkroom said...

Cheaper, but still expensive.

Some links...

http://www.filmrescue.com/still-film-service-details.html
http://www.rapidphoto.net/c22.html

Matt Allen Photography said...

Hey Shari - thanks for the links. Checking out filmrescue now!