How to Get into Film Photography (and Why You Should)
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Re: How to Get into Film Photography (and Why You Should)
#2Film is a very fun hobby that I recently began enjoying. I’ve never been into digital photography — the instant feedback kind of removed the magic for me. Film forces you to finish the roll (or you’re throwing money away) and that helps keep me engaged. When you get the scans back, you get excited to get out and shoot another roll.
I will say it’s expensive, but the real expense isn’t the stock or the gear but development.
Re: How to Get into Film Photography (and Why You Should)
#3Film is a very fun hobby that I recently began enjoying. I’ve never been into digital photography — the instant feedback kind of removed the magic for me. Film forces you to finish the roll (or you’re throwing money away) and that helps keep me engaged. When you get the scans back, you get excited to get out and shoot another roll. I will say it’s expensive, but the real expense isn’t the stock or the gear but develo…
I completely agree - on the cost front though, I find that the development costs are reasonable and actually developing black and white at home is relatively easy and cheap. But the film stock cost has increased quite prohibitively for me, especially compared to 2017/18 when I first started shooting film again.
Re: How to Get into Film Photography (and Why You Should)
#4I kind of think to myself, “Is this picture worth a dollar?”
I don't shoot film anymore since about 15 years, it's totally not worth the hassle. However, I did stick to this mindset of first trying to figure out whether it's worth it overall and only then taking a picture (except when shooting plants/insects for later determination etc, then different metrics come into play). It has a lot of advantages for me, mainly because I really despise what the OP also does (shooting pretty much everything, taking x rounds of the same scene then figuring out the best one). Instead I end up with a sort of pre-curated list and then go through it once to delete what wasn't a good shot or turned out to not evoke any emotion whatsoever when seeing it again. Sure, I might miss something somewhere, but that still hurts a lot less then the mind-numbing and time-wasting alternatives.
Re: How to Get into Film Photography (and Why You Should)
#5The thing with the "real" camera sitting in the suitcase and the phone coming out for actual shooting has been a common trope for a while now. But phones have been around long enough that the difference between a DSLR with a good lens or two has become more well known. I have the latter and it certainly does not sit idle, even though it's over 15 years old by now. It has been such a liberating change coming from film - I used to stress out over every shot due to cost/not having enough film, that I missed many photo opportunities I don't think twice about with a DSLR.
p.s. I realize "DSLR" is not enough to refer to all digital cameras any more due to mirrorless cams, but I do mean to include those too :-)
Re: How to Get into Film Photography (and Why You Should)
#6Film is a very fun hobby that I recently began enjoying. I’ve never been into digital photography — the instant feedback kind of removed the magic for me. Film forces you to finish the roll (or you’re throwing money away) and that helps keep me engaged. When you get the scans back, you get excited to get out and shoot another roll. I will say it’s expensive, but the real expense isn’t the stock or the gear but develo…
I shot nearly 40 rolls of 35mm film on vacation to China in 2001. I actually included development costs as a line item expense in my vacation budget.
Re: How to Get into Film Photography (and Why You Should)
#7The thing with the "real" camera sitting in the suitcase and the phone coming out for actual shooting has been a common trope for a while now. But phones have been around long enough that the difference between a DSLR with a good lens or two has become more well known. I have the latter and it certainly does not sit idle, even though it's over 15 years old by now. It has been such a liberating change coming from film…
I bought an old prosumer point and shoot recently to take some more thoughtful pictures. It's fairly limited by the CCD sensor at 12MP. My phone, a GS22, takes sharper pictures, automatically does the cool aperture settings for a foreground focus, blurry background, and other fancy things. But when you zoom in, there's a ton of terrible upscaling blur that sorta degrades the overall shot.
Additionally it just isn't that comfortable trying to shoot on a phone.
I'm in the school of thought that purposeful technology makes you think a lot more about the role of technology. I like using technology, I enjoy learning to use it like a tool. A too-good phone camera is great for reference shots, quick social media shots, etc, but isn't enjoyable at all when your goal is to take pictures for the sake of taking pictures.
Over-optimization really strips the joy out of life sometimes.
Re: How to Get into Film Photography (and Why You Should)
#8Film Photography will teach you more about how your circuit boards are made, than most CS classes!
This isn't true. But it's fun to see how much everything overlaps!
Re: How to Get into Film Photography (and Why You Should)
#9I think this advice may work for some, but for most I think advantages of digital far outweigh film, even for people just getting into the hobby. Chiefly, being able to make thousands of mistakes is not a bug, but a feature - you need to make mistakes in order to improve, and being able to make them quickly is a huge help. Secondly, digital cameras are so good now that you can just do so many more things than you can with film, like video, swapping quickly between light levels, extremely accurate autofocus, timelapses, astrophotography, etc.
A very restrictive medium can help spark creativity, but it may also prevent neophytes from finding it.
Re: How to Get into Film Photography (and Why You Should)
#10I still shoot a lot on film. I shoot a lot for publication and because of that, I really can't edit individual photos prior to using them, so a lot of what I do to get the 'look' I want comes down to film stock and how I use it.
Honestly, it ends up being a lot more time efficient than fiddling around with images in Photoshop or Lightroom. :)
Yes, definitely more expensive than digital, but you can get some pretty nice film cameras for next to no money, which is nice.