A Ghost in Gent?

About two weeks ago, I went to the beautiful Belgian city Gent for a meet with models and other photographers from Holland and Belgium. Apart from my normal camera, I carried my Holga, loaded with a heavily overaged film (Kodak Vericolor II (C-41) 100 ASA). The fun with overaged film is that you have no idea what the outcome will look like. It may be totally normal, extremely washed out, nothing at all, anything can happen. I had never before used film that was so heavily overaged as this one: its expiry date was October 1982, more than 25 years ago

The funny outcome was that there was quite a difference between the pics after developing them. Some had a blue cast, others red or yellow. They all had a red/purple flair at the bottom and lost contrast as well as sharpness. Not very good pics by any technical standards, but that’s not why one uses overaged film.

One of the pics was a double exposure of a model shot and an architecture shot, that I made by accident. It turned out quite nice because of the placing of the hand and the question mark billboards on the building. The pic as you see it here comes almost straight from the scanner. The only post processing I did was some minor dust removal and sharpen after resize. All colour casts and weird things you see are either caused by the age of the film, the double exposure, or the twist in your mind. You can check out a larger version at my Flickr portfolio by clicking on the picture.