C22 Conundrum

An ex-smoker has a few drinks too many one evening in the convivial company of a smoker, cadges one, buys a pack of ten the next day, and the next a pack of twenty, and there they are, re-hooked. I am told that heroin works in a similar way. And I can tell you that so does photography, no matter how many years you've been away from it.

My particular obsession right now is "film inside" searching eBay for old cameras with that phrase in their description. I got started on this back in 2009.  I think it got a hold of me when I developed these photos of the Queen Mary and the photographer's family near Southampton. Someone takes photos on holiday or of a historic event. They don't finish the roll so the camera goes in a drawer, life intervenes and it's forgotten there.

When these films get developed you get a glimpse into a forgotten holiday. Before they get developed, the possibilities are endless. And the decades have changed the chemistry of the film in any number of unpredictable ways, giving the images a strange beauty you'd struggle to reproduce digitally.

I've got two "film inside" Kodak Instamatics, with 127 film cassettes inside, 12 or 13 exposures taken in each. One of them is definitely C22 film, I can see that through the wee window. The other is likely to be C22.

I've been looking at reproducing the developer used for C22, back in the day, and managed to google a recipe for it. Or maybe I should use C41 chemistry at room temperature?  There's some sage advice from Film Rescue if you scroll down a little way in this thread on Flickr.  (And go onto Film Rescue's photostream, and you'll see that she or he knows what they're talking about).

So b&w chemistry might produce the best images, like the ones I got from the perceptol - which of course have a colour scheme all their own.  Film on cassette, says Film Rescue, stand up much less well that roll film, apparently, the "difference is hugely significant".  It's a significant decision: getting good images; or losing something that's been waiting maybe 40 years...

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