Autumn is always a beautiful time in Garden of the Gods Park in Colorado Springs. I was especially eager to get down there this year, because I have earned three free rolls of film developing at the camera store. Unfortunately I plucked a roll of severely expired film from the drawer that was intended for a test shoot only of an old film camera that I’m not sure works. So, in this post I’ll discuss how to make the best out of a day with a roll of 15 year old expired 400 speed film.
For starters, it is a good idea to over expose expired film a little bit. As the years go by, old film becomes less sensitive to light, and you are going to want to give it a little extra time to burn in.
Unfortnately, I forgot this tidbit and ended up with under exposed images resulting in significant color and luminance noise.
I was able to overcome most of this problem by opening the images in Camera Raw, and going to manual noise reduction to bump up the color and luminance noise reduction to about 50 percent. I tried using Topaz AI on these pictures, but it didn’t seem particularly well suited for finding the severe color noise.
Then of course, the contrast and the color of the film was quite far off, so I had to tweak the “Light” parameters in Camera Raw, particularly the blacks and shadows, to creating a pleasing level of contrast.
If you are interested in my adventures is autumns past, please consider a purchase of my book Two Decades of Digital Photography, an entertaining account of the technical and artisitc advance of digital imaging over the last two decades!
Also feel free to visit my website author page, where you can find a link to my newest novel, as continue my series of wildlife historical fiction with the exciting characters establshed in Spirit of the Wolf, the story of the famous she wolf named 06, for the year she was born in Yellowstone National Park.
Also, please visit and follow my Amazon Author Page, where all my works for sale on that platform can be reached. Your follows there greatly help my ranking among the hundreds of thousands of other Amazon publishers.
Steven W. Krull is a renowned photographer and author who has been photographing and writing of the beauty and wildlife of the Colorado Rocky Mountains for over two decades. Please visit his website at S.W. Krull Imaging to view his work, including thousands of prints for sale, stock images for commercial use, and his library of published books.
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Colorado Photographer / Author / Wildlife Advocate | Steven W. Krull 