A lot of people have commented on the ambitiousness of my plan to shoot nearly a dozen rolls of film on Expired Film Day last year. Here’s how I did it.
It really wasn’t as ambitious as it sounds, for one thing. I’m pretty sure most of the people who have commented were thinking that meant nearly a dozen rolls of 36-exposure 135 film — 300-400 exposures — which would be hard. But that’s not what I did.
I did take some 35mm film, but most of my supply was smaller — at least in terms of the number of exposures per roll.
I took a lot of 120 and 220 film for the Pentax 6×7, which means either 10 or 20 frames a roll. The 127 film in my Brownie Bullet was only good for 8 exposures, and so was the film in the Kodak Six-16 Brownie Junior. Twelve frames for the 120 film in the Agfa B2 Speedex — a 6×6 camera. The 35mm film I took was all 24-exposure rolls save for one — and that one was only 20 exposures. All told, I made considerably fewer than 200 exposures, spread across seven or eight cameras.
Okay, it still sounds ambitious, even to me. But it wound up not being hard.
Part of my plan was to ensure I’d get some kind of usable results from at least some, if not all, of the film I took. I think of that as redundancy for the sake of preparedness.
If you know even a little about electronics — what you might’ve learned in a junior high science class, for example — you might remember the difference between a circuit where current flows through multiple components one at a time, in order, and circuits where it flows through multiple paths concurrently. The former is a series circuit, and the latter a parallel circuit (more about the differences).
If I’d been shooting the film in series, it surely would’ve been quite an undertaking. Sure, when I spend an entire day on the plains I tend to take 80-100 pictures with the Pentax. But March 15 was a shorter day than those in late August or mid-September. And I spent a chunk of the morning getting my Leica back from the shop.
Instead, I chose to shoot in parallel. I loaded all the cameras, and each time I stopped the Jeep I picked several cameras and made a picture or two with each one.
Which cameras I chose was based in part on getting a variety of images on each roll of film, on which had the most frames left in it, and on the scene. In some cases I chose the camera for its ability to fit my visualization of the scene I saw, and in others because the scene might be likely to show favorably some aspect of the camera.
In the end I managed to finish off 10 or 11 rolls of film, I think. It’s hard to remember exactly, because there were some failures and I’m too lazy to dig up my notes. At least 28 frames’ worth failed utterly, and one roll was about half blank due to mechanical issues. I think I finished with right around 100 usable frames in the end.
Of those frames, virtually none are unique. Almost all were replicated, at least the same scene from the same or a similar vantage point, on two or more cameras, except toward the end of the day as I was finishing up rolls. As noted, all the photos on this post are of the same truck, taken with three cameras and four films. But you knew that already because you read the captions, right?
This year I don’t plan to be quite as ambitious, but I do plan to take multiple films and cameras once again. Expired Film Day 2017 is less than two months away!
