Past its Best-By Date

Good article at Popular Photography on some tips and pointers for shooting with expired film.

If you’re shooting film already, you know that you need to develop a tolerance for uncertainty.

Film can be fogged, or wrecked in development. Your shutter might drag or the mirror not swing up correctly. Without an LCD screen built into the camera, you have no way to check whether you got the shot—you’ve put your faith in your camera, your skill, and your film.

It’s like doing a trust fall every time you release the shutter.

Using expired film compounds the uncertainty, like jumping from an airplane with a parachute you just bought at an army surplus store. You don't know who packed it or what it may have suffered in all the years since then. Okay, maybe it's not that bad—there is a lot less to go wrong with a roll of film than a parachute, and a lot less riding on it—hopefully.

This is a necessity if, like me, you've been bitten by a strange desire to fiddle around with some APS cameras, since the newest APS film is a decade past its use-by date...

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