Kodak High Speed Infrared

Kodak High Speed Infrared used to be one of my favorite films.  Kodak stopped manufacturing it in sheet format around 1999.  The last boxes produced had expiry dates of 2000 and 2001.  I still have at least a dozen boxes of that film, in 4" x 5" format, left in my freezer.  

Now that it is more than two decades beyond its best before date, it is becoming badly fogged.  I fear that much of this stock that I have left may become unusable.  It was quite an expensive film back in the day and I seem to recall it cost about $65 for a box of 25 sheets of 4x5.  That was 20 years ago and it would be a lot more now, if it was still available.

When Kodak announced that they were ceasing production I bought as many as I could afford.  Then a few years later, when a couple of my large format friends went digital, they gave me a bunch of their stock.

Most of my images shot with this outdated film were looking like the example below.  This is a shot of one of the draglines at the Sheerness Coal Mine, taken in 2019.  That mine was switched over to natural gas and I'm not sure what became of the machinery.  In any event the image, and most of the others that I shot from 2017 onward, look much like this.

I decided to attempt to salvage what was left of this film.  In the past I had a bad habit of loading a bunch of film holders with this film, and then keeping them around for weeks and even months before I shot them, and then even longer before I unloaded and processed.  Sometimes they rode around in my truck in hot summer weather, perhaps more than once, before being exposed.

So, I threw away the handful of sheets that were left in my started box of film, and pulled the few that were still sitting in holders.  I started with a box of film right from the freezer.  I now only load one or two film holders at a time, and make sure and expose them within  a few weeks of being loaded.  Then when the film has been exposed I make a point of promptly unloading the holder and putting the exposed film in the fridge.

I followed this routine through all of 2022, and recently accumulated a batch of 20 sheets for processing.  I bought a fresh bottle of T-Max developer, and processed that first batch a short time ago.  These more recent negatives look a lot better.  There is still a general overall fog, but not too bad.  There were a couple that had a little patchy fog, but nothing as bad as this one.  So there remains hope that I can shoot this film before it becomes useless.  I will be posting some scans of that recent batch in the coming days.  And from now on I will take a loaded film holder or two out with me every time I'm shooting, and make a point of using them.