In part one I covered the availability of film camera's and gear. In part two I want to cover the availability of film and developing supplies and methods of scanning and printing your photographs.
I am often asked "Oh, can you still buy film? The answer is always a smile and a hearty "why yes, yes you can!" Back in 2017 when I returned to film photography a well known discount store here in the UK was selling Agfaphoto Vista 200 for £1 a roll. I grabbed it whenever I could and will forever be grateful to them for that. Film can be, and often is expensive. This is especially true of the professional films from Kodak and Fuji. Ilford tends to be a little cheaper and the quality of their B&W film is superb, but on the whole Film generally costs between £5 and £20 per roll depending on what brand or format you purchase. I buy my film from Analogue Wonderland and Nik and Trick Photographiques, but there are a growing number of online stores that are selling film around the world as well as some that survived the digital revolution and still sell film to this day.
I was fortunate to be able to hand my Agfaphoto Vista 200 to my local Max Spielmann Photo Store, a survivor of the digital revolution who could still develop and scan my film and print my film photographs in one hour. The current pandemic has stopped that one hour developing service for the time being, but hopefully when conditions allow they will do so once again. I still entrust the staff there with my colour film, but the machinery is getting older and the software ever more obsolete as time goes on. This is a shame as the Fuji Frontier 3000 film scanner and developing machines they use are superb.
Home developing is still an viable option. You can still easily buy a film developing tank and reels to develop 2 rolls of 135 or 1 roll of 120 film in the comfort of your own home. You will of course need a dark bag to load your exposed film onto the reel and place that reel in your light tight developing tank. Also you may need accessories such as film clips for hanging your freshly developed film to dry and squegee's to remove excess water from your films. Another handy item is a graduated cylinder for accurate measurement of chemical dilutions. Paterson still manufacture all these items and they are very reasonably priced.
However, you don't need all of them, you can buy jugs from your local homewares store, a syringe from most chemists/drug stores to accurately measure chemicals and use ordinary clothes pegs to hang your film to dry. It's easy to develop film in your kitchen or bathroom using items you bought from a local store and timing the process using the stopwatch on your smartphone. Developing times are easily available for just about every film and developing chemical combination on the Massive Dev Chart website.
It can be scary when developing film for the first time, but once you get that first one done your confidence rises exponentially. One item you will need is good quality gloves. Film developing chemicals are nasty and can cause problems. Wear gloves, an apron and if possible safety glasses. Gloves also make a handy squeegee, just run your film between your index fingers.You can buy a developing kit from Ilford, the Ilford Simplicity Starter pack that gives you enough developer, stop and fix for two rolls of 35mm or 1 roll of 120 B&W film. I started with it and it costs around £20 including delivery to your door. The developing tank and dark bag I bought new and together they cost around £50. I use them regularly, I have shot and developed 80 films at the time I write this and that number is rising. I have saved a small fortune by developing my own film at home and learned so much in doing so.
There's no getting around the fact that darkroom printing is expensive. Yes you can get the equipment on ebay for a reasonabe price, but it does mean investing in yet more chemicals and making a room in your house totally light tight. The last thing you need when making prints in a darkroom is a stray beam of light making a mess of an image you may well have spent an afternoon perfecting. The alternative is firmly in the digital era, is easily done with no nasty chemicals and you can do it in your living room if you so desire.
There is a growing list of software, hardware and accessories available to make "DSLR Scanning" an easy task. This involves placing your film negatives in a holder over a light source and taking a photograph of the negative. You can then use software such as Negative Lab Pro to convert the negative into a positive and from there print your photographs on your home office inkjet or laser printer. There are also dedicated film scanners such as the Epson V700 and the Plustek OpiticFilm scanner range that make high resolution images of your negatives and use software such as Silverfast to make that negative a positive and optimise it for printing.
Then there's the cheapest option. A small 35mm film scanner that is plug in and play on your PC, takes a smartphone camera quality digital image of your film, converts it to a positive and saves onto your computer. I have an ION Slides to PC film and slide scanner that cost me around £20 in 2017. It gives me 5 megapixel resolution images that I can edit using Affinity Photo, a much cheaper option than Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop and I can print them with my HP Envy 4520 home printer on glossy photopaper I bought from the aforementioned popular discount store for £1. I have sent some of my prints to folks around the world that I have made with this set up and have got great feedback from them about the quality. The purists may scoff, but I can afford this method and enjoy doing it.
Cost is probably the most important thing about film photography and it all depends on everyones individual financial reach. From top of the range Hasselblad systems to a basic point and shoot camera you can buy preloaded with film for £10, there is something for everyone. You can buy a decent autofocus SLR with a lens or a manual camera with a basic light meter such as my Pentax SP500 with a lens on the second hand market for around £50, a developing tank and dark bag for another £50 and enough chemicals to develop as many films as you can shoot in one year for another £50.
For less than the cost of a smartphone with a decent resolution camera or an entry level DSLR or Mirrorless camera, you can shoot film and develop and print it at home. It is such an immersive process that I genuinely get a lot of joy from. If this answer to why I shoot film helps you to decide to give it a try, my work here is done. There are folk out and about today that weren't alive when film was at it's height. It is deeply heartenng to see a lot of those folk buying a film camera to see what the fuss is all about and falling in love with it themselves.
Here are a few more of my images I shot on Agfaphoto Vista 200 in October 2017 that are much better than my first shots. They are the scans I got from Max Spielmann and show the progress I made. I spent 2017 just getting out with my camera and taking photo's. I studied each roll and I learned valuable lessons in that first few months that put me in good stead for the future.
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