Happy accidents: How I shot this “starry night” in broad daylight

I was happily surprised, when I got my Mamiya medium format camera out of its case. One film back still had an Ilford Pan F Plus 50 in it.

It’s always exciting when you forget film in a camera and discover it years later. I decided to shoot the rest of the film at iso 25, to compensate for the age of the film. Funny enough I tried to do that in Vienna at night.

Shooting an Ilford PAN F Plus 50 @25 at night is not the best idea, but I gave it a try anyways.

With enough light and a wall that I could lean onto, I was able to capture my first successful image.

And as you can see, the negative turned out clean as well. Also the second negative turned out clean:

But than it I got black dots all over the negatives. And I really don’t like when things like that happen. I like to be in control with the processes I work with. People who attended my wet plate workshops have probably experienced that. Don’t get me wrong, I like to play with these processes and get sometimes some kind of “controlled accidents”

At that moment I was not Happy, so I started to learn more about this problem.

I had not look to long for it, lots of people had experienced this kind of flaw. And at the end it was still my foult. It looks like its happening when you store Ilford Pan F Plus to long, or leave it in the camera or just let it expire. Some people wrote that these dots could be residues from the backing paper.

Here is one discussion that links to other. You you search the web, you will also find reddit posts. I think this is a well known issue. I just didn’t know about it. But here comes the fun part, as soon as I converted the negative, I was blown away from the result! I love it and I even would love to get more film like that and search for the right subject.

This happy accident made me happy. I would like to reproduce this again with other expired rolls.

Here are some more images, but I think it works best with the capture above:

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