Unexpected Double Exposures in B&W
I was thinking to myself that since I’ve gotten back into film photography, I haven’t shot any Black & White film yet. Which is somewhat funny as I used to mainly shoot B&W!
So I grabbed a roll of Kodak T-Max 400 that I had bouncing around, an expired roll of course, and decided to change that!
I was headed for a film pick-up in Reading, PA and figured I’d take advantage of the change of scenery. I’ve been in Reading many times, but it wasn’t until this trip that I realized how many abandoned and blighted buildings dot the landscape there. Obviously this is a bad thing for the City of Reading. But Urban Decay looks pretty damn cool on some B&W film! So I figured I’d grab a mix of Street Photography & Urban Decay shots while I was in town.
Developing the Roll
A BIG part of why I’ve been using so much expired film lately is because I’m learning how to develop film. This is something that up until a couple of months ago was totally unknown to me. So I knew going in this that I’d be making plenty of mistakes and didn’t want to waste expensive fresh film stock while figuring things out.
What I’ve quickly learned about developing film is so much of it is trial & error. Little changes with something like water temperature, or how long you do certain steps, can yield wildly different results with how the developed film looks.
Before developing this roll I assumed it was around 10-15 years expired, since that’s when a lot of my old film stock expired. I shot & developed to compensate for this, but I got some unexpected results.
What the Hell Is Going On Here?
The unexpected results here were not from an error during the development process. I actually nailed the development process this time. And I’m glad I took notes to make it easier to re-create the results.
What had happened was that I shot a roll of film that had already been exposed. I had accidentally double exposed an entire roll of film!
Eventually I figured out what was going on.
A few months prior I found this roll in one of my camera bags. There was no film leader sticking out of the canister and I couldn’t remember if it was something I shot or if the film leader got wound back into the canister. Which is something that happens to me all the time.
I figured there was a 50/50 chance that it was shot and tossed it into a bag of film in the fridge. When I grabbed it for this shoot it didn’t even occur to me the roll might have been previously exposed.
So what unfolded was a fun surprise with some interesting results!
Who Shot Ya?
Having shot this roll so long ago I had no memory of anything that was on it.
Parts of the images blend together making it difficult to decipher what’s what. Since I re-shot the roll very recently I remember what the newer exposures look like, which helps me pick out the original exposures. There are little clues that signify I shot this rather than it being an orphaned roll: shoes in the one of the shots look like mine, some of the framing & composition look like mine, at least from that era. So I’m confident that I shot this roll over a decade ago and then accidentally re-shot it a few days ago!
It looks like one of those rolls where I took a camera around shooting random things, no real subject matter in mind, and never did anything with the roll. Probably because I was only developing what I thought were my best rolls at the time, due to the expense of having a lab develop the film.
Also to be noted is since the frames don’t line-up and everything overlaps, the whole roll is technically one long image. I had to come up with a creative solution to scan this. And I DID NOT cut the negatives. It’s super curled too which made everything a way bigger pain in the ass. But it gave me all sorts of different framing choices!
BUNCH OF JUNK
There were about a dozen exposures left on the roll of expired Kodak T-Max 400 after my little trip to Reading. I decided to lean into the idea of capturing destruction and urban decay, which is what led me to a junkyard!
Again, at this point I had NO IDEA I was double exposing this roll of film. Even if I did it would have been difficult to line up the frames properly, or even know what had been shot already.
So really, anything that looks cool here came down to LUCK.
The strange thing is the last few shots aren’t double exposures. Those give you an idea of what the rest of the roll might have looked like otherwise.
What Just Happened?
Honestly, I’m shocked these images came out! So many things could have prevented ANYTHING from turning up. I did not compensate for an already exposed roll of film and could have easily overexposed and wiped everything out.
Overall I find the images to be rather abstract and quite beautiful. They ended up being an odd collaboration with myself from two different eras!
Shooting and developing this roll has reminded me how beautiful B&W film is. It also shows that if you take the time to develop expired film properly it can still look fantastic! Up until a few months ago this film was never cold stored. It sat in a camera bag for over 10 years waiting for its moment.
Seeing these negatives has given me a creative rush and has encouraged me to be even more experimental!
I’ve been itching to do more double exposures and here I ended up doing it by accident! Double exposures are absolutely something I’ll be playing around with in the near future. This roll has really has me inspired!
