These shots are the product of a combination of two gifts, for which many thanks are due: the camera, a Canon Sure Shot Owl, was from my father in law and it was produced in 1994. The film is from my wife—it’s from a batch of Kodak High Definition 400 that she had bought around 2006. So they’ve got a total of 42 years between the two of them, clearly a good sign to any Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy fan. I figured these were a perfect match: a decades-old point-and-shoot camera paired with expired consumer film.
Canon Owl. The blue painter’s tape is holding the battery door closed. The battery door’s terminals were either corroded or lost, so I wound up using a loose terminal from a Canon T-70, and then holding the thing shut with tape. It worked well enough, though occasionally I had to squeeze hard to make sure the batter was making contact and powering the camera.
I’d never shot the Owl before, and it may have made more sense to use known-good film to do a test, but I was impatient and didn’t have new film on me, and I figured that if I ran into any issues, I ought to be able to discern whether the problem was the in the camera or in the film.
Knowing I was shooting with expired film and an old camera led me to look for things that seemed of another time, like this house.
One challenge, though, is that to get the best possible results out of expired film, it’s usually best to overexpose it by some amount (the best web resources I’ve found on just how much are this piece by Ludwig Hagelstein and this piece by Daniel J. Schneider). As film degrades over time, it will often need more light in order to produce a properly exposed image. In many film cameras, an easy way to do this is to adjust the ASA rating on your camera. If you tell your camera that you’re shooting with a less-light sensitive film than you actually are, then the camera will try to compensate and get more light onto the film. Unfortunately, with the Owl, this was not a possibility.
Consumer film cameras frequently used DX coding to set that ASA rating. The DX code is a pattern of conducting and non-conducting rectangles on the side of the film canister. The camera reads these and then automatically sets the ASA rating to match the speed of the film indicated by the DX code . This is a great way to insulate against user-error, but the Owl also lacks a way to manually adjust the film’s ASA rating in a circumstance where you want to over or underexpose the film.
Fortunately, there’s a way to actually change the DX coding on the side of the canister so that the camera thinks the film is of a slower speed and requires more light.
The DX code is essentially a strip of metal and plastic along the long edge of the film canister. That strip matches up against a row of electrical contacts in the camera, and the pattern of that strip tells the camera what it needs to do to expose the film properly. To change the DX code, you can use a combination of scraping away plastic squares on the film canister’s surface, and using electrical tape to cover specific contacts (see this handy tutorial by Amy Berge).
Don’t know if it worked, but I felt cool doing it.
In truth, I can't tell whether or not my attempt at doing this hack was successful. The film is old enough that some amount of underexposure and fogging is almost inevitable, so without doing a side by side comparison and shooting a roll that I haven’t hacked, it’s though to tell whether this was worthwhile or not.
The camera itself functioned reliably and pretty consistently. I do appreciate how straightforward it is—there’s a simple, big optical viewfinder, a fixed focal length, and that’s it (there’s a flash, though I only used that a few times). The camera’s aesthetics are a product of its early-90s era: it is a rounded, plastic box, with rubber buttons that, by original design or by age are a bit mushy. Compared to my other point-and-shoot camera, it’s a bit large, and most of the time that I carried it around, I used the strap that came with it.
At the Nittany Mall. Another scene in which the vintage look of the film seems well-suited for the subjects, here, overgrown potted mall plants. Upon this dias, they look as if, one fateful day in 1999, a three-piece band of unknown origins rolled into town, and played a surprise gig at the mall late into the evening, rocking inspired, righteous tunes better than anyone had ever heard. But then, when the first ray of sunlight came streaming through the sunroof, the crowd grew silent, astonished. The band was now plants.
As I recall, this took some lightroom edits, but all in all, not bad. The film and camera did a decent job capturing a pretty wide dynamic range, from the bright light reflected off the rocks to the shadows in the rafters.
I’d say about 90% of my shots came out in focus and reasonably well-exposed. While the times focus was not accurate to what I wanted were frustrating, I realize in retrospect that the truth of the matter is that I have probably had a lower hit-rate when I’ve been manually focusing with my AE-1 Program. As I’ve branched out from the AE-1 Program to cameras that actually have autofocus, my appreciation for autofocus has only grown.
Axemann Brewery. I was about to write that I was too close for the autofocus to work, but that’s not true—the “Table T6” sign is reasonably in focus. So I was perhaps 6” too close to get the empty flight in focus (my goal) but at a perfect distance to get that sign in focus. In retrospect, even if I knew the minimum focus distance to a T, I still likely wouldn’t’ve hit this shot.
As for the film, it looks like it held up pretty well over the years, and if you’re in the market for a vintage look, a combination like this camera and this film are going to do the job. Still, I’ve found that the aesthetics of expired film aren’t so compelling for me as to accept the frustrations of the occasional unusable shot, or having to do more tweaks in Lightroom.
Summertime.