Any photographers here still shoot film?

Cafe Society
21

I still use 35mm film. Hell, my main camera is an early-60s Honeywell-Pentax H3. Auto-focus? Through-the-lens light metering? Flashes in the pan, that stuff will never catch on. I usually shoot slides; there’s only one place in Boston I can get them developed anymore.

Nah, at this point the only reasons I haven’t switched are inertia and waiting for the price/performance curve to bottom out. A guy I worked with was selling his Canon 20D a couple years ago and he let me try it out for a day. I liked it a lot better than I thought I would. I’m just kinda waiting until I have the money and a good excuse to buy a nice DSLR.

22

Not to be nitpicky, but of course they’re the same thing. What is a black and white photo? A photo with all of the light information but the color.

Granted, there are different compositional considerations if you want a print to be in B&W as opposed to color, but removing the color info after the shot has been taken is just as effective a way to get a B&W photo as shooting on B&W film.

23

I like taking mainly black and white photographs on an analogue SLR. I have a digital camera too but it’s just different. Apart from anything else I love getting back a set of black and white prints. Different types of colour film are interesting too. I know someone can come along and say blah blah blah we can do all that on a digital anyway but as I say it’s fun and it’s slightly different. :slight_smile:

24

I mostly use an Olympus OM1 (totally manual 35 mm film SLR) and then scan the negatives with a Nikon Coolscan V. The resolution (about 22 megapixels for each of the three colors plus an IR channel) and dynamic range (4.2) of the resulting images is outstanding. The best digital SLR cameras are now approaching this resolution, but the dynamic range of the film/scanner is still superior.

25

I’ve had my Canon AE-1 for thirty years (although I haven’t shot with it in maybe 15). I almost sold it at one point, but got all sentimental and backed out of the deal.

It now sits on a display shelf as if it were a piece of art. I know it is not worth much monetarily, but it holds as many memories for me as…well… a photograph might.

mmm

26

It seems like this might be the place to ask this question; it hasn’t seemed important enough to start a thread of its own.

Firstly, I am not a photographer. Never have been, and I have no ambition to be one, except in the most casual sense. I have a compact digital camera, and it’s mostly there to catch those random, “hey, that’s cool” kinds of moments. I take snapshots, not photos, if that helps explain where I am.

Back in '89 I bought a Pentax K1000 at K-Mart. I was in North Dakota, driving through the Badlands, and I had never seen anything like the place, and I knew none of my friends had either, so I bought what seemed to be the most reasonably priced camera that would take decent pictures, and through which I might start exploring to see if photography was something I liked. I used the camera for a couple of years until it got stolen, and I never bothered replacing it with anything similar.

As far as I can remember, it was not much more than the body, a basic zoom lens, and as rudimentary a flash as I could get. It did, however, seem to take extraordinarily sharp and vibrant photos, particularly in bright sunlight. I’ve never seen anything come out of a compact digital that even came close.

So, the questions: Am I misremembering how good this camera seemed to be? I’ve often thought about picking one up on Ebay, or at a garage sale the next time I see one, just to mess around with it, but buying 35mm film and processing that film seems silly if I’m not actually going to get anything better than my Nikon CoolPix can generate. Was this a cheap, reliable, decent camera body like it is in my memory, or am I just looking through the rose-colored glasses of age?

27

Yes, you’re misremembering. It was a basic SLR and I doubt the kit lens was particular sharp. It will produce better images than you can get with a $150 point and shoot, but that’s pretty much true for any SLR camera. Film is a bit more forgiving than digital, but you can do better than the Pentax K1000 with a basic digital SLR kit for less money and more functionality.

It wasn’t a bad camera, but it was a basic, all manual model. It retained a following because it was just that; bombproof, all manual, and great for learning photography. There’s probably still a market (albeit dwindling) for it today. Factor in the price of film and developing and it’s not really a cheaper option for long.

28

I gave away both of my Nikon N70 bodies to a photography school when i bought the D100. It was a wrench to do so, but the advantages of digital so far outweigh film that it seemed like a logical step. I’ve loved B&W photography since the days when I took that high school class in the 60s, and have toyed with the idea of finding an old large-format camera just to shoot B&W. But that would require setting up a darkroom, and I hear the chemicals have gotten very expensive now, particularly since Kodak has gotten out of that end of the biz.

29

I still use film, I still keep the negatives, and I still put the photos in a photo-album.

Now get off my lawn.

30

Ah, yes. This is the other thing about film vs. digital. If you don’t print out your digital images, you do have the problem of the persistence of data. For example, I have something on the order of 15 TB worth of internal and external harddrives with photos I’ve taken in the last 5 years, all duplicated. Now what happens when/if the storage standard changes, say, twenty years from now? I have to pay attention to transferring all that from one storage medium to another. Granted, in 20 years, all that will easily fit on one disk, but it’s easy to get lazy about this. I remember archiving on SyQuest cartridges in the mid-90s. Does anyone even know what to do with one if they found one? Do you even know where to find a drive for those popular, but awful Zip Disks (I’ve had three drives experience the “click of death” and erase my archives?

Meanwhile, a neg from 100 years ago is still a neg that’s “readable” to the human eye and can easily be transferred to print, either using traditional means or digital means.

So, that is one thing–you do have be a bit more paranoid and active about your “digital negatives”, to make sure they persist. That said, it’s easier to keep up with than binders and binders of negs.

31

Thank you, i’ve been saying that for years. I recenty developed a batch of photos from negatives of stuff taken almost 30 years ago for a pal and voila! no problem.

32

I have one. You can borrow it if you want.

33

I missed this. That’s a valid nitpick. There’s nothing magical about shooting in black-and-white, but one does often make difference compositional choices based on whether the end result is intended to be color or black-and-white.

The biggest advantage to shooting in color and then converting to black-and-white in post is the flexibility and tone control you get. You’re not limited to the spectral response of your particular film–if you want to separate the reds and greens more, move the slider governing the luminance of your greens and reds. If you want to make those skin tones lighter and creamier, then you move up the luminance of the oranges, or emphasize the red channel, etc. It’s really, really awesome the tonal palette the digital process affords you.

That said, there is something about the grain and look of black-and-white film and a well-printed print that I love, and I’ve never been quite been able to get the same feeling from digital. (And I don’t like adding grain effects to digital images.) It’s another one of those vinyl vs. CD type arguments. Plus I like the ability to rein in those highlights that are likely to get clipped by a digital sensor (unless you use a HDR technique).

As I said in my first post, BW and perhaps Velvia would be the only reasons I would take out my film camera (and good riddance to color neg–never liked the look of any of the films.)

34

That’s not the problem. The problem is going through and actually looking at all those shots. Unless you have them carefully labeled and categorized, what’s the point of storing them?

35

I don’t know if it’s quite the level of “dark secret” of digital photography, but many people do forget to think about this important consideration. I always emphasize to my wedding clients that, even though I send them a couple DVDs, make sure to dump the wedding photos from those DVDs onto at least one, if not two computers. And already I’ve had about three couples who have lost a disc, or scratched a disk. Luckily, I’m a nice guy and keep everything in duplicate (and triplicate for the edited wedding work), so I send 'em out another disk for free, but this is not something I guarantee in my price, and I shudder to think how many people simply don’t listen to that advice.

36

They are labeled, just as the negs are. And the digital stuff is easier to organize using programs like Lightroom and Aperture–assuming those programs continue to exist and be supported in the future. This is why, even though they have great tools for cataloguing, I still insist on naming folders descriptively, with a date prefix in the form YYYYMMDD. Right now I’m going through the last five years of my work to print up a new portfolio and update my website. It’s been quite painless using Lightroom.

37

I have a Holga somewhere in my closet with a roll of film in it. Does that count? :stuck_out_tongue:

38

I have a Brownie Hawkeye in the basement, which somehow makes me far superior to you. :smiley:

39

:confused: I agree that just pulling the saturation controls down to nil is a lousy way to get black & white photography, but Photoshop & Lightroom provide much more sophisticated and robust tools for processing monotone exposures.

Color is always turned to black and white. If you have an experienced eye, why does it matter if you’re accomplished it via cellulose or digital imaging?

40

I just got an American Photo in the mail today, and found something appropriate to this thread:

This is about Steve McCurry, the photographer most famous for his National Geographic “Afghan Girl” cover, and also he had one of the last rolls of Kodachrome developed:

Pretty much what I said upthread. Also, there’s an interview with Dan Winters, a photographer best known for his celebrity work. He appears to still shoot film.