When I started this blog, my goal was not just to explore what makes a photo good but also to reconnect with my roots as a photographer. In a previous post, I shared my experience using an expired disposable film camera, which sparked an interest in experimenting with things others might view as worthless or discarded.

There’s a whole community of people fascinated by the results of shooting with expired film, and it’s easy to see why. The images I captured with the expired disposable camera were nothing short of surreal. The colors were unpredictable—muted and desaturated yet somehow bright and vibrant at the same time.

My love for photography began during the final days of film’s dominance. I was still taking photography classes when digital cameras started to go mainstream, so 35mm film photography is something I’m quite familiar with. However, once I bought my first digital camera, my film cameras were sadly relegated to a shelf, where they collected dust for years. Starting this blog has reignited my interest in analog photography.

Before picking up my Rebel 2000 and loading it with film, I decided to go even further back—to my childhood—and revisit my very first camera, the Kodak Mickey-Matic. Released in 1988, it used 110 cartridge film. I was only five years old at the time, probably too young to fully appreciate photography. However, by 1990, this camera was practically glued to my side. Since it played such a significant role in my early journey as a photographer, it felt like the perfect place to start reconnecting with my roots.

I found a roll of K-Mart’s Focal 110 film on eBay. This particular roll expired in 1988—the same year the Mickey-Matic was released. Given that my previous experiment involved a disposable camera that had expired in 2000, I knew this was going to be an even bigger test of how expired film behaves.

What I found fascinating about shooting with film again is the intentionality it requires—you can’t just snap photos of anything and everything. One reason it took me so long to go from buying the film to writing this blog is that I had to slow down and take my time. I carried the Mickey-Matic with me everywhere, always on the lookout for moments worth capturing.

Many times, I had to make a choice: Was what I was seeing worthy of being committed to film, or should I simply pull out my phone for a quick, casual shot? Honestly, though, that probably didn’t even matter because the results were mixed at best. Looking at most of the photos, I couldn’t even remember what I had taken pictures of. The only exception was the shots from a car show I attended last summer. In a previous post, I wrote about my love for visiting car shows, so while I was shooting with my Olympus OM-D, I occasionally pulled out the Mickey-Matic to capture a few moments.

One of the photos was completely abstract—just blobs of grainy color forming patterns rather than recognizable images. The ones that did have discernible shapes were almost as expected, but unlike the shots from the disposable camera, these lacked vibrancy altogether. Instead, they were flat, lifeless, and dull, with an overall brown tint.

One of my favorites was a surreal photo of a barn and trees on the horizon, set against a bright white sky with a dark, detail-less foreground. The quirkiness of the expired film gave it an eerie quality, almost like a scene from a horror film. There’s another similar photo with the same unsettling vibe, but the first one, with the barn on the horizon, stands out as truly unique.

There were also two photos with unexpected results. One was a double exposure from the set of car show photos. I’m not sure if this was caused by the camera or the expired film, but the effect was interesting and worth noting. The other was a different kind of double exposure—rather than two overlapping images, it had the film’s edge markings overlaid on the photo.

As much as I love the unpredictability of expired film, some results required extra work to bring out their potential. Many of the negatives had a strong blue tint, which surprised me. I think it’s important to point out that the final images I’m sharing aren’t straight from the negatives—I’ve made adjustments. I’m including a side-by-side comparison of one photo, showing how it looked on the negative versus the final result.

110 film first hit the market in 1972, developed by Kodak for their Pocket Instamatic camera, and came in a variety of film stocks. Unlike its bigger sibling, 35mm, 110 film was designed to be easily loaded into a camera, making it perfect for little kids like me starting out in photography. The film itself is 16mm, and according to the original specs, it was supposed to have a 10-year shelf life.