As I mentioned in our last post, Julie and I purchased an Advanced Photo System (APS) point-and-shoot camera before we got married because we wanted to be able to take nice pictures on our honeymoon. We also thought that it would set us up well for the future, since APS was the hot new(-ish) thing in consumer photography, and it had a bunch of amazing new capabilities, such as automatic recording of time and date information as metadata and mid-roll film changes. Compared to the drug store 110 cameras I’d played around with on family vacations as a teenager, the camera we bought seemed like the pinnacle of high technology.
Of course, this was the fall of the year 2000. By 2003, digital cameras were outselling film cameras, and when our daughter was born in 2004, we bought a brand-new digital point-and-shoot so we could take pictures to our hearts’ content (and we did). In all, I think we used our APS film camera a grand total of three times: on our honeymoon, as planned; on a trip to Point Reyes for our first anniversary; and when we bought our house in 2002. Our investment in the future of photography didn’t work out very well for us.
I was surprised, then, to come across a completely unexposed roll of APS film as I was digging through our bin of photography gear last month. It had to have been sitting in our closet for at least twenty years, and had probably been expired for fifteen. I could have just thrown it out—that would have been the most sensible thing to do—but I’ve been deep into oddball photography–adjacent projects for the last couple years, and that led me to an inescapable conclusion: I was going to shoot this film.
That decision led to a conundrum: I have no idea where our original APS camera is. I’m sure it’s around somewhere—knowing myself, there’s no way I would have thrown it out—but there was no way I could put my hands on it. So, I did the obvious thing: I bought an APS SLR, the Canon EOS IX, on eBay. And, unwilling to stop there, I bought a lens, as well: the generally well-regarded (but inexpensive) Canon EF 24-85mm f/3.5-4.5. Did I have other EF-mount zoom lenses I could have used with this camera, as well as the 50mm prime I used just a couple months ago to shoot a roll of black and white film? Of course. But based my research, the consensus seems to be that they produce significantly worse images than the EF 24-85mm model, and that clearly wouldn’t do for a project as important as this one.
So, with the equipment sorted out, I was ready to shoot my single roll of expired APS film. The conventional wisdom on the Internet seems to be that you should overexpose expired film by a stop for every 10 years since its expiration, so I set the exposure compensation control on the camera to +2 stops and went to work finding things to photograph around the house and in the yard. It’s mid-February here in California, which means that, for all intents and purposes, it’s spring. As such, there was plenty to focus on. You can see the results here; I’ve also included a picture of the camera in all its late 90s glory.
All things considered, the photographs turned out surprisingly well. I had no idea whether the camera and lens would even work, since I had bought them sight unseen from anonymous sellers. And the film was a complete wild card: though, as far as I knew, it hadn’t been exposed to temperature extremes, it had been stored around the house for twenty-plus years with no particular effort put into preserving it. Taking those factors into account, I was very pleased with the images I got. Neither the camera nor the lens has image stabilization, so camera shake was a problem for indoor shots, but brightly lit outdoor scenes came out better than I had any right to expect, and the color wasn’t too far off.
In all likelihood, I’ll never use this camera, or shoot another roll of APS film, again. But the equipment was dirt cheap compared to modern photography gear, and I had a great time putting it all together and using it to take some pictures.
Occasional Dispatches from San Jose 
