Or... you can do what I did and buy 100' of the stuff that expired in Feb. of 1981 and load it up on some 35mm spools and throw it in a camera. Then, since you are in the mood to break the rules anyway, process it in your kitchen in C-41 chemistry instead of the 'required' E6 transparency chemistry (cross-process). Go ahead. Don't be afraid. You have a hundred freakin' feet of this stuff! ok, you don't have to do all of that rebellious stuff, but I did. Unfortunately, I didn't quite get the exposures right. I shot the film at iso 50. Everything was quite over exposed in the Nikkormat FTn and because of a malfunctioning aperture, everything was under exposed in the Olympus Pen EES-2. So next time I will shoot it at iso 100 and see what happens. But I still got a few frames that were salvagable. The film base is a deep orange, so mucho color correction had to be done. In the end, I ended up with contrasty, saturated photos, pretty much what you expect when toying with x-pro. You can see the pronounced grain which I think is because of the age of the film even though the person I bought it from said it had always been in cold storage. But let's face it, 32 years is pretty old when you are a roll of film.
Here is the shot from the Nikkormat FTn. I have a Nikkor 50mm 1:1.4 lens that has good contrast to begin with, so with the 'push' and the x-pro, contrast is, well, high.
I made a diptych with a couple of the half frames from the Pen. These images show even more grain and I think some additional noise from the scanner.
Still, for all of the strikes these images had against them to begin with (expired, wrong equipment, wrong chemistry), I think they are not horrible. I think I will roll up some more and keep on going with it.
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