Film Used to Cost a Lot (Day 6 of 31)
Are you a digital native with photography, or do you remember film? I was a film diehard for a long time, making the switch only around 2006. Film was getting harder to buy, harder to have developed, and just generally more of a hassle. I was pretty sure I’d dislike shooting digital, though, so I’d held out for a long time.
Well, this was another lesson learned about the fallacy of predictions. I loved my digital camera. The difference in the tones of the print, which I was sure would bother me, didn’t seem like an issue. There were slight differences, but they were minimal.
And the cost per shot! These things were basically free! Sure, printing was still an expense, but you could take photos and view them for nothing. I felt I’d been set loose on the world with unlimited resources. The first eight months I had my first digital camera, I took 10,000 photos—around 40 per day. A few years later, I was up to 100 per day, or more.
But in the past year or two something has changed for me. I’m not tired of taking pictures; far from it. But I remember how much more thoughtful I had to be when every single shot represented an expense that was coming out of my wallet. (For those of you who don’t remember the days of film, it used to cost around $4 a roll, with developing and contact sheets or proofs on top of that.) Paying for it had kept me careful. Back in the 1980s, I always had to weigh my priorities, use my judgement, consider the shot before I pressed the shutter.
Do I think the extravagance of the past few years has been somehow bad for me? Like a moral failing, a photographic gluttony? No. I feel that I sharpened a lot of my skills during these years of easy photos, of taking hundreds of photos a day. It’s been great for me. I just find that I’ve moved into a different phase.
These things come upon us without our planning them. An interest or compulsion ebbs, or something inside you shifts. I’m reaching a point where what feels right for me now is to take fewer photos, more judiciously. It’s quite possible I might even return to shooting film.
Don’t you love the ways we surprise ourselves? You can think you know yourself so well, and then you learn something new.
(For the month of October 2017, I’m participating in the 31 Days bloggers’ challenge. You can find out about it here, and check out the interesting work other bloggers are posting.)
When I taught at RIT in the late 70s, the combination of high material costs and low academic pay was mitigated only by the generous annual Kodak materials grant ($400 worth of any materials Kodak made, as I recall). I chose to max my grant on 35mm Tri-X, then scrimped and saved to afford Ilford papers for printing (Luckily the RIT lab provided all B/W chemicals free to faculty and students, including the buffered D-76D that I preferred.) In my last year there, I discovered color — and shot a lot of both 35mm and medium format color-neg film — but managed only to afford only a single box of Ektacolor paper, most of which went to contact sheets. I loved my new color work, but the cost of materials and the fiendish difficulty of achieving even a fraction of the control I enjoyed in B/W printing was a heartbreak. Digital was absolutely freeing for me — near total control over contrast, spot detail, and virtually every aspect of the final image. I just shake my head at the romantic allure film has for many young photographers today. I would never go back to those balky, expensive materials, any more than I would take up wet-plate photography.
You make some good points, Bruce. Digital photography seems miraculous to me, but for all it’s quality and convenience, I still sometimes miss the process of processing film and making prints, as well as the look of the silver halide. I think digital has made me a better photographer–allowing me to experiment freely, but a poorer editor. Just too many files to keep track of!
Yes, I remember film. I still use it a little but more for fun than anything else. I’m just a bit older than you, early 60s. I bought my first camera while in college (probably ’75?) and my first digital in 2002. This was not an easy decision as I loved film and could not believe these digital cameras could give me what I wanted. Well, I discovered soon enough what so many others have – digitals were not great (back then) but they were so much easier and freeing.
But as I mentioned, I still shoot some film. Both medium format and 35mm, usually b&w and I still really like it. It reminds me to slow down ,not depend on the camera to make all the decisions for me. Developing at home is cheap and easy enough but scanning is a pain. I’ll never use film as my default medium again but I find it hard to turn my back on it completely.