Emulsions and inky blacks...

So I’ve been scouring the web/markets for a used F80 instead of the bulky F4 (don’t get me wrong; the latter is an amazing camera but jeez it’s heavy) for everyday photography using my Nikkor glass.

After a bit of research, I’d settled on either F75 or F80 but the all black body and similarities to F100 won me over and I started looking for one around July 2015. Fast forward to December 2015 and an example with the all too common sticky back showed up on eBay for a pretty reasonable price. Its batteries were dead, it came with no lenses and an old Lowepro camera snoot. To my delight, I had also scored a pretty rare incarnation of the F80 body, this one came with the coveted ‘s’ back that converts the camera to F80s. The back allows it to perform the date stamping like F80D but also exposure information between frames as well.

A few days after purchasing it, I met up with the vendor to pick it up and he advised me that there was a roll of film inside the camera but he wasn’t sure how long it was in there for or whether it was fully exposed or not. His last recollection of using the camera was about 10 years ago!

I took the camera home, loaded two new batteries and the number ‘37’ appeared in the frame counter window signifying that it was almost fully exposed. After rewinding the film and leaving the leader out, I was left with a roll of 36exp Kodak T-MAX 400 from (at best) the early 2000s.

Knowing that my pre-mixed D-76 was on its last legs (as visible in the pics), I thought it’d be a good chance to kill off the chemicals and discover whether there was anything interesting on the mystery roll of film.

Fast forward 10 minutes of 1+1 development and a few more mins of rinse, fix and rinse again and the results were remarkable (to me at least!)

It appears that the owner had opened the camera at some point while the film was inside, as the first few frames had been over-exposed/light burned however the rest of the roll was of photos of Paris and its landmarks. The date stamp on the images has dating to early 1998 which makes these images over 17 years old and the roll potentially closer to 19 or 20 years!

Olympus XA w/ Fuji Acros 100

Anzac Bridge from Balmain (Sydney)

Revue 400SE on Fuji Neopan 400 (expired)