Old and Older

As the owner of a couple 127 cameras that I'm quite fond of, I'm always on the lookout for another roll of 127 black and white film. I'm not desparate as I have a FCK 127 with which I can cut down rolls of 120 film, but it's a rather fiddley process and I'm pretty ham handed with it.

A while back I was looking on ebay for 127, thinking to myself there must be something better than the dreaded GP3 that is currently as exhorbitant as real film, when I stumbled upon a couple rolls of March 1973 Verichrome Pan that were offered at a better price than any new film I could find.

As any semi-rational being would, I had my doubts and fears about shooting a 50 year old film. Rodinal was recommended to me as being pretty safe for well expired films. I was going to go with a very dilute solution and semi-stand development when I read some opinions that a less dilute solution (1+25) and a shorter development time could result in higher contrast and less fogging. How could I resist an attempt at higher contrast?

Much to my surprise, most of the roll came out much better than I could even hope for (I lost a couple shots through various ineptitudes on my part).

These are obviously some pretty mundane compositions (as usual for me) but I think this old film, shot with my even older Ica Icarette 0, speaks pretty well for itself. I have one more roll of Verichrome, but I'll keep my eye out for more decent deals on it. I may not be so lucky next time, but who knows?

As alluded to earlier, these were shot with my 1925 Ica Icarette Model 488 folding 127 camera with Tessar f/4.5 and developed for 7 minutes in a 1+25 Rodinal (Belini RO9 Spezial) at 20° C.