While going through some boxes in his garage, my father found an exposed-but-yet-undeveloped roll of 16mm film from around 1979. This roll was Minolta branded (Kodak rebranded), in its little dark box still, and had been shot with his Minolta 16 camera. He posted the roll to me with a note asking if I could develop it.

Well, I’ve developed some pretty old rolls of film in my time. Every time I’m in a thrift/antique/charity shop, I check every single camera for existing film inside by winding the knobs and checking the windows, and it gives me the biggest thrill to find that film does remain in there. The oldest roll I’ve attempted to develop was marked ‘1968,’ and it did not go well. But, a few I’ve developed from the ’80s and ’90s have gone alright. So, when it came down to it, the options were to let it sit forever unknown, or give it a go and potentially see what my father was up to in 1979.

I went back and forth for a long while over whether or not to actually develop it as colour film. It was old enough that the colours would likely be degraded, I figured, and those instructions to “process promptly” and “store and 55° F or lower” were definitely not adhered to. It had been though a lot, and stored in garages from sub-freezing climates to heated desert climates. I worried the heat needed to process colour film might damage it further. After all, you can swap C41 for D76 (or ID11 or caffenol) and get black and white images, but, once again, I thought I should just go for it.

I used a modern C41 kit to do this, (note to my future self to link to the developing film at home post here). This roll was manufactured just on the cusp of formula changes in film processing, but I went with my instincts and tried my best not to over-complicate it.

Gleefully, I checked the strip of film to find that every image did indeed come out! I just had to wait until the film dried, and get it into the scanner.

I could tell by the fact that the negatives are pure green that we were going to have some very red, very degraded images. Here is an example of how the colour came out:

As feared, the cool tones are pretty much completely gone and we’re left with yellow and red. But look at that, there’s an image! That’s the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco, California!

So, sometime in the spring or summer months of 1979 (or potentially 1978, I don’t know how quickly these things were stamped “to be developed by”), my father went to San Francisco, California and took his Minolta 16 along with him. Seems like he met up with some familiar and unfamiliar (to me) faces, saw Porky’s in theatre form, and visited the famous landmarks like the Golden Gate Bridge, The Palace of Fine Arts, Lombard Street, some Warner Bros studio, and something to do with battle ships. Some pier, I guess. And now we get to relive it, nearly half a century later.

Even though I think the vermilion images are fabulous and wild, I have exported them all as greyscale simply because some of them are impossible to decipher without it. Here they are:

Isn’t it fantastic that light imprinted onto some photosensitive chemicals in the ’70s could just wait and maintain its shape for all this time? These moments in time simply waited, patiently, in a box that I existed nearby for large portions of my life. I may have moved this box, touched this very undeveloped roll of film at some point in my childhood. My father may have, in the decades since exposing it, picked it up a time or two before and said “oh wow, I need to get that to the photo lab” and forgotten again, until photo labs stopped processing 16mm film. I’m glad I got to help free it from wonder, and see a tiny image of my father, before I knew him, shaking hands with a rooster.