“Process before Oct. 1970”
The first roll of ORWO NP15 that I shot a couple of months back was said to expire in 1970, which means it has surpassed it’s recommended date by more than 50 years at the time of writing.
As with any old film stock, I have no idea how it was stored or where, but I could still deduce from the state of the roll, which just from its outer appearance has gone yellow and the spool is showing signs of rust, that it had probably been “mistreated“ for the better part of its existence. Truth be told: I have absolutely no expectations in regards to the result. Nevertheless, I am rolling it up and going on a trip to try it out.
Weather: Completely overcast
Top to bottom: +4, +3, +2
Weather: Cloudy with some sun coming through
Top to bottom: +4, +3, +2
Right from the start you can see a couple of (very typical) defects going on:
Fogging - the entire film is heavily clouded; this is the overlaying structure you can see which looks like it had been double exposed.
Light Bleeds - nearly all vertical edges of the film have been exposed to light prior to being exposed by the camera. This is also very common if the film has been laying around without the plastic wrap.
Damaged Emulsion - visible as dark spots throughout all images.
But besides that, I am impressed, that it did that well. This particular roll of film has obviously suffered a lot due to storage, and still it was possible to get recognisable images from it. Looking at the above results I would probably go for overexposing the ORWO NP15 by 4 stops on a cloudy day and 3 stops on brighter days. Now, if we setup a rule of thumb (as the one mentioned earlier) it should probably be:
1 stop of overexposure for every 15 years past expiration
Developing 50 year old ORWO NP15
This part was quite challenging as well, since there are no official recipes on how to handle this film. After some semi-successful research I decided on the following recipe:
Component
Kodak D-76
Adox Stop (60% acetic acid)
Adox Adofix
Dilution
1+1
1+19
1+4
Time
32 minutes
1 minute
7 minutes
Looking back it might have been better to use an HC developer (like Kodak HC-110 or Ilfotec HC), since it also counters the fog to a certain degree. This assumption is also based on this blog entry (German only), which was the only article I could find on the development of this particular type of film. He uses a combination of Kodak HC-110 and Rodinal, which I will try out with the next roll.
Conclusion
Would I use this film for any project where the taken shots were indispensable? Absolutely not. But that doesn’t stop me from shooting the remaining roles and even acquiring more of this stock. As always with expired film there is no guarantee for anything, but since I was able to pull images even from this poorly treated roll of film, getting my hands on some properly stored ones is worth it in my mind. The unpredictability of the result captures the soul of this long discontinued and over-aged stock.