Punching your way into film identification

So the usual has happened. You have a pile of undeveloped film. Maybe you didn’t note the processing (N, N+1, N+2) or maybe it’s bulk loaded film that has no label on the cassette (for example, you might find it very easy to confuse Ilford Pan F Plus 50 with Ultrafine Xtreme 400). Or you can’t remember what order you shot film. Of course, the difficulty is that unless you somehow identify the film canisters, you’ll mix things up. And even then, once film is out of the canister and developed, there is rarely a persistent indicator of what happened. Data backs for 35mm cameras are something of a pain, they don’t record everything, and almost all of them are going extinct in 2018. Buy a Nikon F6 that records exif data? It’s a little late in the game for that.

The solution: the $5 arts & crafts hole punch and a $5 film-leader puller

One perhaps non-obvious solution is to permanently mark the film leader. You obviously can’t do this with a pen because the writeable part of the film will get washed off in processing.

The most effective way I have found to achieve this is with craft hole punches, which come in various hole sizes (1/16, 1/8, and 1/4″ – 1.5mm, 3mm, or 6mm), as well as a variety of shapes (round, hearts, stars, diamonds). As long as you make the marks on a part of the leader that will not be discarded (so not the long thin tongue part on commercially loaded film), these will survive the development process and won’t go anywhere until you snip them off. The uses are numerous:

— Bulk-loaded film: If you punch the leaders with a distinctive mark, you can avoid mistaking one type of film for another. For example, where it is very easy to confuse bulk-loaded Ultrafine Xtreme 400 and Ilford Pan F Plus, punching the Ultrafine with a heart will help you avoid mixing things up when loading your camera.

— Processing regime: If you are going to push-process film, punching the leader with a mark (such as a star) either before or after exposure will help prevent you from mixing up your N, N+1, and N+2 films. If you need to, you can use a leader-retriever to pull the leader out and mark it after fully rewinding.

— Order the film is shot: If you can’t imprint the first frame of a roll with a data back, you can use a number of punches to signify the order in which the roll is shot. You can even do this before you shoot the film.

— Camera or lens used: no data back records focal length, and camera bodies of the same make – assuming they even have a film-gate cutout for identification – use the same cutout (for example, Konica bodies usually have a triangle notched into the edge of each frame).

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