Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Resurgence of interest in film photography

I find this interesting, the fact that many pros and advanced amateurs are going back to film for different situations.
I have always enjoyed using 35mm film more than digital.
I suppose this is akin to the increasing interest in vinyl albums.

I used to be a professional photographer, I had a darkroom in my house with an expensive Beseler enlarger.
These days my $1,200 Minolta outfit sits in a box gathering dust, and I am shooting a $900 Nikon electric camera.

It is interesting to me to see the resurgence in film cameras. I do like electric cameras and I really got tired of mixing all those stinking chemicals for my film camera. Developer, stop agent, and the fixer, a stinking mess.

I see the same thing, but I would not go back to film . It is likely 50 cents a picture now days . I can shoot a picture and save it for a penny or so , have it on my computer in 20 minutes . I remember waiting a week for my pack of film pictures. The film are 3 bucks for Fuji, 4 bucks for Kodak, than 4 bucks to have it processed . That was 7 bucks fo 24 pics, just to find out you only liked 5 of them... Now days I have a Cannon MK111 full frame. It takes awsum pictures . I can blow it up to 20x30 and it is so clear. It is a very heavy camera , and got it used for $1,000 . The camera new was about $6,300 . I put on a used 35 -135? lens that was $900 new . I bought it for $175. Now days , I would have never bought the camera. It is way too heavy for walking in the woods. and it sits an awful lot cause it's so heavy.

Polaroid instant cameras are a big thing with kids now. My granddaughter is 16 and has one and loves it. I didn't even know you could get film for them anymore.

Yes, in the old days I would shoot a roll of film at the college baseball game, 36 shots. I went to all the trouble of developing the film, and only five or six photos were worth printing.
With my new Nikon, I will shoot 110 pics at my brother's soccer game, and simply edit out most of them right in the camera, to wind up with 10 good pics.

Digital got a lot of newbies into the photography game. A decent camera paired with a mid level printer can turn out surprisingly good photos. Add a good photo editor and it's amazing what an amateur can do.

Pretty hard to find labs that will do a good job developing now days. Walamrt,Walgreens won't give the size some wants, nor the quality

Photo editor DXO has Filmpack, which will convert your digital photo to look like your choice of old film. Seems easier.

Anybody want to buy some film equipment?.........Nikon & Olympus.

MM

I'm a hack photographer that started with my parents 35mm camera circa 1966. I still have my Canon A1 that has been drug thru the mud, the blood and the beer. I have shoe boxes full of negatives. From 1989 until 1998 I did commercial real estate appraisal. At that time I would burn several rolls of 35 mm film taking pix of the subject of the appraisal and comps. Then have 3 or 4 copies of each. Then you had the time delay and the hassle of taping each print to a page.

I would never go back to film.

Think of the convenience of a smart phone/digiscoping, GoPros, Drones.

I have 15,000 photos and 765 videos on my Apple instruments.

I have images from 6 to 10 game cams that may take over 1,000 pix a month going back at least 10 years.

Over 16,000 images on Photobucket, 7,700 images on IMGUR. (more than a few duplicates)

Vids on You Tube.

With digital I can shoot in both JPEG and RAW, and even a hack like me can do post photo processing.

Those images are only as remote as my memory.

I recently went on a "hunt/shoot" and took 550 images in 2.5 days. Most were unsupported using telephoto lenses of up to 600 mm on a crop sensor camera. Quite a few were not up to par. Can you imagine the cost to develop those and 1/3rd or more not be usable.




These are the good old days.

ya!

GWB

My son is a very talented photographer/videographer who takes a lot of film photos as well as hours of video thru out the West. Here is a short video of his from last year.

Old stuff always cycles, it seems. The advantages of digital will far outweigh the "nostalgia" of film for me. I mostly do sports so digital is much more efficient

Middle son is 44 and loves to play with film. It is all in what you want to do. He has taken Polaroid photos all over the world to give away to the subjects of the photo. Many kids, especially in Africa. That said he has good digital equipment he uses profusely. It is a good time to like photography.

so my old FM-2 is back in style... i'd hate to pay todays prices for developing...

Just fer' schitz n' giggles.

I am a hack photographer. No classes or training, just shoot lots of images.

99%+ of the images I post on forums or social media is straight out of the camera. I have a pet peeve about over manipulation.

Yet with digital, a hack like me can do the following in minutes from start to finish.

This is the original JPEG. Data at bottom of pix.



Here is a screen grab of the Camera RAW image, no manipulaton.



Here are three different iterations changing only the contrast, color temperature and then converting to monochrome, using only the Canon Digital Professional 4 Software that is a free download from Canon.











In fact it took half the time to post process the photo than it did to compose this.



ya!

GWB

Whistle1: My Nikon 35m/m cameras (notice the plural!) and my many Nikon lenses nowadays sit idle.
I have NO plans to go back to film cameras and film developing.
Lots of great pics and great memories from back then but times have changed and I think for the better.
Hold into the wind
VarmintGuy

Back to the vinyl records the OP mentioned...what's that all about? I didn't think they were all that great back in the day...but I never had quality stereo equipment.

I went to the Navy's Photography "A" School in Pensacola in 1968. I spent 4 glorious years taking/processing/printing photos for the USN (and myself.) Some of my work got international distribution, but they weren't too concerned about giving photo credits in those days, just "Official US Navy Photograph."

I kept with it after I got out, never went professional but had a darkroom for a number of years. Today I have little interest. I do have a high-end Nikon digital SLR that mostly sits idle. Most of my photos now fall in the "documentary" category and I take them with my phone.

I love technology and am amazed and kind of blown away by the fact that, now, we can do right in the camera what we couldn't even do in the darkroom "back in the day." Silver-based chemical photography has very little application today, primarily among the fine-arts crowd. Even there there's less and less justification for it.

A friend of mine taught classes in film photography and tried to keep a community darkroom operation going for several years but finally gave up. There's a lot to producing good images, be they silver or digital and the level of technical expertise and work required to do so film-based just can't compete.

Fifty years ago there were only a handful of processing labs that did good work with B&W films and most of those only worked for pros. Today I can't imagine there's anywhere you could get quality B&W processing done other than doing it yourself.

The world moves on.

As someone who is new to the vintage hifi game, I’m not sure yet that I can answer your question. I’m playing Sinatra, rock, and Jazz albums on pioneer or technics TT to a Marantz, Hafler, or a Harman Kardon receiver and out through either Marantz Imp-6 or Diatone speakers and it all sounds great to me…but so does a digital track through the same setup. I have a sansui r-t-r tape deck to mess around with next and see how clean and deep I can get the sound to be.

But does it exceed a new turn-key digital music file setup? Idk. 🤷🏼‍♂️ Probably not for most folks including me, but it’s fun to dabble with. I fear a tube amp might be in my future. 😬

Paul Simon - Going Home, AKA Kodachrome


[Verse 1]
When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school
It’s a wonder I can think at all
And though my lack of education hasn’t hurt me none
I can read the writing on the wall

[Chorus]
Kodachrome
They give us those nice bright colors
Give us the greens of summers
Makes you think all the world’s a sunny day, oh yeah
I got a Nikon camera
I love to take a photograph
So mama don’t take my Kodachrome away

[Verse 2]
If you took all the girls I knew when I was single
And brought 'em all together for one night
I know they’d never match my sweet imagination
And everything looks worse in black and white

[Chorus]
Kodachrome
They give us those nice bright colors
They give us the greens of summers
Makes you think all the world’s a sunny day, oh yeah
I got a Nikon camera
I love to take a photograph
So mama don’t take my Kodachrome away

One of my Ed Harris fav's




ya!

GWB