What happens when you shoot Ilford HP5 that’s been sitting in a box for 35 years? Expired film is an experiment, not a gamble.
I recently got lucky; a box full of old 35mm and 120 film landed in my hands, and it was loaded with Ilford HP5 Plus that expired in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
We’re talking nearly 40 years old. I didn’t know if it would work, but that’s kind of the point.
"I've started thinking of expired film not as a gamble, but as an experiment. You set the conditions, run the test, and see what the film tells you."
Before putting the expired stock through its paces, I needed a working camera. I’d recently picked up a Nikon FM, a model I’ve loved for years, and wanted to confirm the shutter was firing correctly at all speeds and that the meter was accurate.
A fresh roll of HP5 took care of that nicely. Everything checked out.
Time to get weird.
Why does film degrade over time?
The silver halide crystals in film slowly lose sensitivity as they age, affected by heat, humidity, and background radiation.
As a rule of thumb, for every decade past expiry you’ll lose about one stop of effective sensitivity, so film from the late 80s might need 3–4 stops of compensation.
Pushing in development (adding time or temperature) helps recover contrast and shadow detail.
Roll #1 - Expired Ilford HP5plus
Metered at ISO 100, pushed to 1600 in development.
This is the roll I’d want to frame. The grain is deep, chunky, and present in every corner, the kind of texture that used to take people years to find and now gets chased by presets that never quite get there.
The dynamic range held up better than I expected.
Some of the modern context in the scene gives it away as new, but the film’s character is pure nostalgia. It scanned beautifully and felt exactly like black-and-white film should.
Roll #2 - Expired Ilford HP5plus
Metered at ISO 400, also pushed to 1600.
This one struggled. I loaded it later in the afternoon as the light was fading, and while I finished the roll in full daylight the next day, the tonal balance suffered. Shadows disappear into the blacks, and getting usable data out of the scanner took real effort.
That said, this roll gave me one of my favourite shots. A skateboarder rolling past, caught mid-coast. The compression and grain do something to it that a clean, new roll never would. Sometimes the difficult roll delivers the image.
Note: Both rolls were developed in Ilford Ilfotec HC at a 1+31 ratio.
