Many years ago I was given some expired black and white 120 film including three rolls of Kodak TMAX 100. The storage conditions were unknown and to be honest the person who gave them to me said most likely they were just stored in the attic space in a cardboard box for years.
The expiry date on the Kodak TMAX 100 was June 1989. I had two choices, either throw them away or expose and develop them, well let’s be honest, option 1 was never going to happen was it, so I loaded a roll into the YashicaMat, set my light-meter to ISO 100 and exposed a roll.
Development
At this point, some people would freak out, reach for the calculator, grab some graph paper and do all kinds of complicated maths to decide how to develop this 35-year-old film but I decided against this.
Inside the box was the Kodak instruction sheet which gave some development times for certain developers. I have some HC-110 and could have used that, but I wanted to use some XTOL, which I have mixed.
I headed over to the Massive Dev Chart to see what times were in their database. I decided to go with the 7.5 time and increase it to 8.5 minutes thinking that the film may have fogged a little over the years. There is no magic formula here, just intuition.
Sunflower – Kodak TMAX Expired Film
For a 35-year-old expired film, the results were in my opinion very good. I guess the moral of this, is to not get too bogged down with complicated technical stuff and just go with your own experience and intuition.
Post Processing
The negatives were scanned on an Epson V800 and processed in Adobe Photoshop using my Digital Zone System Plugin.