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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)

#61

Post by gabereiser »

hef19898 wrote: post #57
mod50ack wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Digital is so much easier, until you want to print I mean, it's not really hard. You just need the hardware to print the photo well.

Yeah, that's were becomes expensive again. Good foto printer either cost a fortune, a fortune for ink or both. Well, still cheaper than printing externally. Printing well so seems to be a bit of an art so. Selecting the right paper for the printer and foto, doing some trails... A bit like developong and printing in a darkroom, from the looks of it. Not that I have a lot of experience, I need to save the money for the…

Ink printers, where do I start, there’s only one style I can even recommend. Refillable. Forget HP, forget Canon, Brother, get yourself an Epson refillable. Obviously, laser is superior, but if you really want to keep costs down, Epson’s refillable inkjet printers are the only ones that don’t shutdown if you run out of black ink scent. It’s a racket and you should not participate in providing HP or any of those printer companies your money.

https://youtu.be/AHX6tHdQGiQ

Re: How to Get into Film Photography (and Why You Should)

#62

Post by didntcheck »

mlsu wrote: post #54

It used to be worth it, maybe in the early to mid 10s when the pros switched to digital and film stock was dirt cheap. But now a single roll of Portra is like $25 and even a mediocre rangefinder is $400. Nowadays, when I see someone shooting film -- I think hipster with more money than sense. The benefit now is that nice digital DSLRs and their lenses are cheap. You can pick up a nice used a6000 with kit lens for les…

The cost per shot of film adds up quickly, and I'm always sure to emphasize that to friends who ask about film photography as a cheap option, but the price of the cameras seems exaggerated to me, especially given how much a used DSLR or mirrorless of equal "reputation" would cost. If you're buying one of the iconic cameras, or whatever one the "influencers" have declared a "hidden gem" this week then sure, but there's plenty of good used SLRs and point-and-shoots to be bought for comfortably under $100 (perhaps rangefinders are harder to find cheap, I've never looked). And of course there's no image sensor to differentiate the price, so a top-of-the-range SLR and a cheap one with the same lens mount should theoretically take equivalent images

Re: How to Get into Film Photography (and Why You Should)

#63

Post by hef19898 »

gabereiser wrote: post #61
hef19898 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, that's were becomes expensive again. Good foto printer either cost a fortune, a fortune for ink or both. Well, still cheaper than printing externally. Printing well so seems to be a bit of an art so. Selecting the right paper for the printer and foto, doing some trails... A bit like developong and printing in a darkroom, from the looks of it. Not that I have a lot of experience, I need to save the money for the…

Ink printers, where do I start, there’s only one style I can even recommend. Refillable. Forget HP, forget Canon, Brother, get yourself an Epson refillable. Obviously, laser is superior, but if you really want to keep costs down, Epson’s refillable inkjet printers are the only ones that don’t shutdown if you run out of black ink scent. It’s a racket and you should not participate in providing HP or any of those print…

Top of my list is an Epson ET-8550, ticks all boxes except price. Followed by a Canon Pro-200, ticks all boxes except ink cost. The pigment printers are all too expensive, and the ink cost of the Epson cartridge models is prohibitive. Problem is that the break even for a ET-8550 is so far out that the Canon one is almost cheaper for the first 80-odd a3 prints. Well, maybe I find a deal for one or the other and the decision is met for me!

Re: How to Get into Film Photography (and Why You Should)

#64

Post by gabereiser »

didntcheck wrote: post #60
gabereiser wrote: post #13

Getting your film developed is why everyone moved to DSLR's and mirrorless. It's not so much that the newer digital cameras are better (they are), it's the fact that you don't have to wait 2 weeks for your photos. I have Nikon SLR's that have been sitting in the bag for 20 years. I have Cannon DSLR's that see light a couple times a year. I have a GoPro that sees the abuse that an ex-skater, ex-snowboarder, ex-surfer,…

Yeah I think photography is a good demonstration of how "practical" concerns are often stronger than the "performance" differences that enthusiasts instead focus on. Early digital cameras were, in a word, shit, yet they still had strong interest from consumers due to the "productivity" benefits. Once prices came down they quickly ate film market share, yet 35mm film arguably still had better image quality even in the…

It was around the 18MP mark I believe. That was the inflection that made digital photos higher quality than their physical counterparts.

Re: How to Get into Film Photography (and Why You Should)

#65

Post by dietrichepp »

KennyBlanken wrote: post #50
jtriangle wrote: post #36

If you're a serious photographer who's only shot digital, shooting film for some 'burner' shoots will improve your photography significantly. Film is a much more intentional process, you have to pay attention to light and composition at a very deep level before you capture an image. That practice improves technique that leaks over into the digital realm as well. Typically, when you go back, you take fewer photos but…

This is a bunch of retro-grouch reverse-snobbism hogwash. Buy a digital interchangable lens camera and make a conscious effort to both shoot a lot (and be willing to purge stuff, don't become a packrat) but also spend time experimenting and focusing on getting a particular shot or style of shot as best you can, technically first, and then artistically. People who lack the discipline to be "intentional" without being…

> This is a bunch of retro-grouch reverse-snobbism hogwash.

The advice isn’t bullshit, but neither is it some technique that will “improve your photography significantly.”

People who draw will do all sorts of weird exercises to develop their skills. This includes targeted practice, and yes, digital artists will sometimes practice with pen and paper. I see that practice as being kindred with the photographers who shoot on film as an exercise.

Mostly, it just encourages you to spend more effort visualizing the end result before you press the shutter release on your camera. It’s not some powerful technique to unlock your skills, but neither is it snake oil or hogwash. It’s easy to get stuck in habits, and one of the habits you can get into in photography is to just take a ton of pictures, hoping that one of them will look good. Maybe you just keep taking pictures and making adjustments until you get the right picture. Spending some time with film just forces you to break the habit. It would be nice if you could just tell somebody to slow down and think about what they’re doing, but we’ve got these messy human brains which don’t always follow our instructions as well as we’d like.

> Even the most serious, dedicated, methodical beginner will find it all exhausting unless they're practically autistic.

We used to teach film photography to ordinary high school students, maybe age 15 or so. I don’t think our current generation of high school students is substantially different.

> Film has terrible dynamic range…

This depends on the type of film you use. B&W film has phenomenal dynamic range. Color negative film has excellent dynamic range. Color positive film has narrow dynamic range.

If you shoot slides, you have to be damn precise with your shots. B&W negatives are very forgiving as long as you don’t underexpose them too much†. The dynamic range of B&W film is probably higher than the capacity of your lens to produce a high-contrast image. If you took pictures pointing your camera into a laser beam, or pointing into the sun, your picture would get overwhelmed by flare.

†Likewise, digital is very forgiving as long as you don’t overexpose.

Re: How to Get into Film Photography (and Why You Should)

#66

Post by irrational »

elzbardico wrote: post #33
irrational wrote: post #19

My Mom never left! She has a cell phone but still uses an old point and click film camera (at least it has autowind and doesn’t use the old lever to advance the film). We keep trying to convince her that paying for film and development isn’t such a good thing, but she is set in her ways. The grandkids at least are amazed when she brings it out. She even has a laptop and a desktop computer where she could store the ph…

In 50 years probably the only photos your kids will have from today will be her grandma prints.

We make photo books for every vacation and every year. We leave them stacked up on the coffee table and the kids love looking back through them.

We are old enough that we used film cameras for the first 10-15 years of our marriage. But at a certain point we digitized all of our old negatives and then threw the physical photos and negatives away. They take up way too much space.

Re: How to Get into Film Photography (and Why You Should)

#67

Post by irrational »

ghaff wrote: post #40
elzbardico wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In 50 years probably the only photos your kids will have from today will be her grandma prints.

I've had a couple of photo books made but I print very little. No room on the walls and I don't really need more physical "stuff." And while various things can happen to physical prints, I expect that most families don't really have a way to systematically pass down digital artifacts.

We have about 3 terabytes of family photos and videos. They are stored both on a local hardrive and on a cloud backup. They are probably the most irreplaceable thing we own. But I haven’t really figured out how to make them available to all the kids at some point. They know about the physical drive, but I’m not sure how to pass on the account information for the cloud backup. I don’t really want that information in my will right now since I’m not ready for the kids to access it and they have copies of the will.

Re: How to Get into Film Photography (and Why You Should)

#68

Post by ghaff »

irrational wrote: post #67
ghaff wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've had a couple of photo books made but I print very little. No room on the walls and I don't really need more physical "stuff." And while various things can happen to physical prints, I expect that most families don't really have a way to systematically pass down digital artifacts.

We have about 3 terabytes of family photos and videos. They are stored both on a local hardrive and on a cloud backup. They are probably the most irreplaceable thing we own. But I haven’t really figured out how to make them available to all the kids at some point. They know about the physical drive, but I’m not sure how to pass on the account information for the cloud backup. I don’t really want that information in m…

Assuming you're willing to share the photos themselves today, probably some sort of rotating trading of USB drives? Provides redundancy too and 8TB or whatever drives are pretty cheap.

Re: How to Get into Film Photography (and Why You Should)

#69

Post by dietrichepp »

VoodooJuJu wrote: post #46

Sounds like he thinks the benefits of film are its physical limitations and expense, but those limitations could always be emulated for digital shots too. Does film generally look better than a pre-processed raw digital photo? If so, that'd be a better selling point to me. Not having to master fiddling with clunky post-processing software - much more appealing than, "film is better because each shot costs a dollar, I…

> Does film generally look better than a pre-processed raw digital photo?

Under typical circumstances, no. Even digital JPEG is better than film, most of the time.

There are some exceptions. Negative film retains details even when overexposed, unlike digital. Medium format or large format film is a lot less expensive that medium format digital, but you need to take pictures carefully and use slow film to take advantage of the difference. Slides still look amazing in-person—they have better contrast than typical monitors, and typical side projectors / light boxes can get pretty bright.

Professional photographers back in the day would deliver slides as their finished product. In one workflow, you don’t do any post-processing on the slide at all—you scan it in, you print it out, and you make sure that the colors in the print match the colors on the slide. You have to get the picture right in-camera, and then you’re done.

Re: How to Get into Film Photography (and Why You Should)

#70

Post by taylodl »

If you're going to go into film photography then you should be building your own darkroom. That's not cheap. Not only for the equipment you need, but also for the dedicated space you need that also must be kept dust-free. Dust is the enemy of film photography. Hope you don't mind your fingers always smelling funky. Having grown up in a dark room and have been working in darkrooms since I was 4 years old, I don't look back on them with rose-tinted glasses.

I'll stick with today's digital darkroom. I've become a master at Gimp and I can do whatever I want with my photos. If I want a high-quality print then I can go around the corner to Walgreens and print what I want in whatever size I want. The difference now is I can focus on the photography, not so much the process and the equipment.

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