This was a 9×12 Agfa Isochrom Filmpack of unknown age but from some time between 1926 and 1945. Safe to say it was slightly past its expiration date.
I really wished someone would make filmpacks again, it’s such a convenient way to shoot 9×12 – you get 12 shots but without any hassle of changing film holders and stuff. One could theoretically repack one with new sheet film, but I think modern sheet film is too stiff. This stuff is much thinner, more like medium format film.
It’s also always difficult to gauge how to shoot this very old stuff. I treated it as ISO 10 or so, even though this should be something like ISO 25 originally, and then I underdeveloped it slightly. And did so badly, as seen on the third one – 12 films in the “taco method” in one Patterson container is pushing it a little bit too far. Probably not the best method, but it is a method. There are other rules of thumb about expired film (“1 stop overexposure per decade”) but that’s not very scientific either. And it gets a bit silly if it’s like 8 decades as it is here. The problem with black and white film isn’t really that it looses speed that much – more that it’s just fogged all over and you have to cut through that somehow.
The one downside with filmpacks is that you can’t really develop one and look and see and then shoot the rest, so it’s all flying blind.
Scale-focused and hand-held, through a ~1920 German 9×12, mostly at 1/20s and f4.5.
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