Film in a Digital Age: A Love Letter to Analog Photography
The craving for something tangible has been on the rise in the past few years. Audiophiles are going back to vinyl and CDs. Some people are even ditching their smart phones for flip phones. It’s only natural that this retro renaissance would also include a resurgence of film photography.
My introduction to film photography came in 2017 as an 18 year-old high school graduate. I had a terrible break up, and was looking for a different outlet to vent my emotions. While I used to write and workout, neither of those were proving to be particularly helpful. So I picked up my mom’s Canon EOS t5i Rebel, a digital camera, and began teaching myself the basics of photography. I began with photographing the some of the most common subjects, flowers, family, sunsets, and eventually moved into photographing abandoned buildings in the coalfields of West Virginia.
My first film cameras were nonfunctional decor pieces picked up from antique stores and flea markets. That is, until Christmas that year, when my uncle handed me a brown leather bag. It was worn and faded, and on the inside was a Minolta SRT 101, a film camera from the 60s. My uncle had previously been a part time photographer, and he received the camera as a gift for a shoot he had done. My uncle had noticed my increasing interest in photography, and decided to gift me the camera and three lenses.
A Minolta SRT101, much like the first one I owned.
The moment I picked up the camera sparked a fascination I couldn’t contain. I was born in 1999, too young to witness the prime of film photography. I remembered film point and shoots from being very young, but the concept of analog photography was entirely foreign to me. I immediately took one of the rolls of expired film in the bag, looked up a Youtube video on how to load it, and proceeded to walk around our family’s land in Lincoln County, WV, photographing whatever interested me. I was immediately taken by how meticulous and detail oriented the process was. It was slow and methodical, and I loved it. It proved challenging, but in all the ways that can be rewarding.
The very first image taken on the Minolta SRT 101 gifted to me was of my uncle’s cat Whiz.
It took a while, but I switched up camera systems many times over the next five years until I landed on what I liked. I now shoot and own multiple 35mm cameras alongside a medium format Hasselblad 500CM and a couple of digital Nikon bodies. Across the more than three dozen cameras I’ve owned between now and then, I’ve shot hundreds of rolls of film accounting for nearly 5000 frames. They aren’t all great. I’d be happy if some of them never saw the light of day outside the negative books or external hard drive, but they were a quintessential part of my photography journey. Film forced me to learn every aspect of photography twice as fast as digital, and it was brutally unforgiving.
Don’t get me wrong, it is easier, more efficient, and notably cheaper to shoot digital. Let’s do some quick math. Let’s say you bought a starter film SLR camera with a lens for $50. Maybe it was an SRT 101 like me, or a Nikkormat FT, or even a camera from the 90s like the Canon Rebel XS. You’ll need film next, so you go to your local drugstore and pick up a roll of Fuji 400, formerly Fuji Superia 400. That’s $8 for a single roll of 36 exposures if you’re lucky. More expensive films like the coveted Portra 400 can cost as much as 3 times that amount for the same number of images. So you go out and shoot your roll of film in your new camera and you’re ready to see your images. Your images need to be developed and then scanned or printed. If you take your photos back to the drugstore you bought the film at, they’ll charge you $16 to develop the roll and send you an envelop of 4x6 prints. You won’t get your negatives back, and because of that I recommend somewhere like the Darkroom or Pro Camera. For those keeping score at home, you spent $50 on the camera but to take and see the images you spent $24 or $0.67 per photo.
Comparatively, let’s say you buy an entry level DSLR like the Nikon D5300. You can get one new with a lens from Nikon in 2024 for $600 and let’s say you spend $10 on an SD card. You front more money initially, but the camera is rated for 100,000 shutter actuations before service is recommended. Think about this number like your car’s milage in regard to oil changes, you can be a diligent steward and service as soon as recommended, or you can run it into the ground just to see how far it goes. For the sake of argument, let’s say the shutter explodes and the camera dies at 100,000 photos. You spent $0.0061 per photo. To make this more clear, if you shot and developed 100,000 photos of Fuji 400 and developed them all with the drugstore, it would cost you over $60,000.
Film is not economical. It’s also not quick. If you are lucky enough to live within driving distance of a film lab, very few labs still allow for rush orders on film and even then, the days of one hour photo are almost entirely gone. So that client looking for headshots for a magazine same day would demand digital photos.
So why shoot film at all? It’s about artistic expression. There are people on both sides of the film vs. digital debate that are loud an obnoxious, each claiming their side is better. Photography is the only art with such loud-spoken critics people using different media. Painters don’t break out into debates over the merits of acrylic vs oil. So why do photographers?
At the end of the day, shoot what makes you happy or what helps you learn photography best. For me that’s a mix of film and digital. The film is mostly personal and fine art work, while the digital is more for client facing work. Does that mean I won’t use a digital camera for fine art or a film camera for a client shoot? Of course not. I understand the merits of each and apply them when I want to achieve a certain look or style. At the end of the day though, the best camera is the one you carry with you, be it a film camera, mirrorless digital, or even your phone camera. Take photos and be happy.
