arhphotographic

I came across this roll of FP4 plus in a charity shop last year , and although at the time I was only developing colour film I had to have it. What a great looking box, I thought.

Fast forward to September 2020 when I started my journey into developing black and white film and I would now get to open the box and actually try the film and develop it!

With my colour expired film, a general rule of thumb that seems to work for me is to increase exposure by 1 full stop for every 10 years past its expire date. But what about FP4 plus? The internet produced a number of possible options but I decided to go with 2 stops over exposure so I lowered the ISO to 32. So how did go?

In post-processing I then used an exposure adjustment to see what would happen.

Lets look at another image.

I tried the same post-process adjustment.

One final example

Clearly it’s always good to get exposure correct at the point of capture. It was helpful that I had a date to go by on my expired film. But what do you do when you don’t know how old or what conditions the film has been subjected to.

In my digital darkroom I have a plethora of tools that will help me rescue an image should I need to. However from this unsophisticated experiment I would be happier to overexpose my film than underexpose it. Not spending too much time in front of the computer has got to be a good thing.