I Shot 20-Year-Expired Kodak Ultra Film and You Should Too

Meeting my friend in the corner of a traditional English pub, he slides the goods over to me on top of the table. “Here you go mate, I don’t know if it will work. But good luck.”

I pick up the box and take a look. The expiry date reads June 2006, almost 20 years, so I’m extremely skeptical that it will work. But as a recent convert to film photography, I’m willing to give it a try. My friend assures me that the pictures will come out fine and that there is a demand for such items.

Of course, I started out my career shooting film; I think the first ever serious photograph I took was on a Pentax K1000. But back then, I didn’t know any different. As soon as I got a digital camera, I pretty much forgot all about film.

It was only over time that I began to once more appreciate just how good film is. It blows my mind that large format film cameras are capable of capturing more-detailed, higher-resolution than digital, but what I most love about film is the color.

See, in the modern age where you can manually set white balance, spend hours color-grading your pictures, or purchase presets from an Instagram-famous photographer, there is something incredibly satisfying about shooting a film stock that nails the color right out the box. It means less time editing and more time shooting. That sounds great to me, because editing is monotonous and shooting is fun.

All this is to say is that once I pilfered my dad’s Canon AE-1 camera about a year ago, I have been shooting film on a semi-regular basis. I save it for special occasions like holidays or weddings because, let’s be honest here, it’s not cheap to be a film photographer in 2025.

So when my friend and esteemed photographer Nick Wilkinson (@nickjw_750) told me he had some expired Kodak Ultra 400 in the back of his cupboard, I was intrigued. I’d never shot expired film and therefore had to look up how to shoot it. The rule I followed is that for every decade past its expiration date, half the ISO. So, I set my AE-1 to ISO 100 for the Ultra 400 film.

Conscious that I didn’t want to overexpose the film too much, if the camera’s light meter was suggesting f/2.8 then maybe I’d close the aperture by a click. I was aiming to overexpose it by about one and a half stops but really it was a guessing game.

The expired roll of Kodak Ultra.

Of course, the way the pictures come out is also heavily dependent on how the film has been stored. My friend assured me that the roll had been in a cupboard for most of its life which is good, because had it been left out in daylight or kept next to a radiator, then the film might have been spoiled.

The Results

I really wasn’t expecting very much from this roll of film. I didn’t shoot anything in particular, but rather just took the camera on days when the weather was nice and shot whatever took my fancy — truly the best way to enjoy photography, in my opinion. Perhaps that’s why I was so tardy getting the film developed or maybe it was because my film lab packed up and moved 200 miles up north, but that’s another story.

Fun fact: This tree is one of the last remaining from the ancient Forest of Arden which once stretched across the Midlands of England.

Happily, I found a new film lab called PPP which did an excellent job and I was astonished by the results. The pictures came out better than I ever could have hoped. Although I can notice a slight color fading when compared to fresh celluloid, virtually all of the photos came out well and had a good dynamic range which meant I could tweak the contrast, shadows, and highlights in Photoshop.

In case you’re interested, I shot with two lenses: a 28mm and a 50mm. As for the film, so far as I can tell Kodak stopped producing Ultra sometime in the 2000s but the UltraMax 400 is clearly its natural successor. You can still pick up expired rolls of Kodak Ultra on sites like eBay for $10 to $15, if you’re keen to give it a try yourself.

Image credits: Photographs by Matt Growcoot