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Test Shoot with Expired Portra 160 Film
A fun experiment with an expired portrait film
I recently did a test shoot of expired Portra 160 film using my Mamiya RZ and the TTL (through the lens) metering prism. I did this mainly to see how much the color shifts on the film and try the spot vs average metering capabilities of the prism. I usually shoot with handheld incident meter and the waist level finder but I noticed that my metering is sometimes off. Usually in the hardest light situations.
So I loaded up an expired roll of Portra 160 and headed out some closed stores/buildings along the highway where I live. Some closed before Covid19 and others during the pandemic. It’s all a really sad thing to see but I’ve been attracted to the neglected, abandoned, or empty spaces for many years. Here are the resulting photos and my notes on the TTL metering and whether or not I overexposed them or not.
I shot all ten frames at F/16 since it was a nice sunny day but I overexposed some frames by +1 (stop). The reason is that Portra is fantastic to overexpose by +1 because it really brings out detail in the shadows as you’ll see in the images below. They’re also not color corrected from scanning, a straight scan, and unmodified. I’ve uploaded the high-resolution scans of the images in the body of this article, just right-click on them to open up…
