Does anyone still use film?

Gold is probably cheaper x

My folks had a projector screen, so it couldn't be that expensive...

Googled "slide projector screen", found they're still available at low cost. Amazon has one for about $50US.

We never had a projector screen. And I had to walk to school in the snow, uphill, both ways, with holes in my shoes!

😁

Rich

I started shooting film whe I was 7 years old with a little Bakelite camera, a Kidak Baabby Browine Specisl- 8 exposure on a roll of Verichrome 127- processed through the drugstore. I continue the shoot film for a very long- long- super long time as a professional photographer. I used many brands, types, and sizes- 16mm Minox to 8x10, and just about everthg in between. My old studio had 2 darkrooms and a fully equipped color lab. In most aspects of commercial photography film is pretty much a thing of the past. Client demands for expeditious delivery of DIGITAL images have fueled this trend early on, once digital gear and software became available and commonplace. Digital photography offers many advantages as to quality and production as more flexibility and ease in the production of special effects, retouching, and image manipulation. This is the computer age and digital photographic technology is computer-driven.

This is not to say that there is anything inferior about FILM photography. It requires a different set of skill sets per exposure and processing. Some prefer the level of craftsmanship thatis requ for excellent results and many others maintain that "look" cannot be replicated in digital work. Some foksl tell me they miss the smell of the chemistry. Nowadays film supplies and materials such as chemistry, are in a niche market and as a result, many of MY favorite films, papers, and chemistries are not readily available if at all. This is why I began my transition to digital early in the era. It is not practical to make "scratch" chemicals
from components and formulas and component ingredients in the quantities that would have been needed. The varieties of s films and papers began to disappear, along with their accompanying pre-packaged chemicals.

There are many fine-art photograhers still producing great images that sit "obsolete" processes- cyanotypes, tintypes, wet plate, and more- not for the average hobbyist or snap shooter.

Meanwhile, back to the present. There as so many photographers swearing by digital capture but killing themselves to replicate the "look " of various films. Kodachrome is a biggie they even "strip in "the sprocket holes!

The manufacturer of it will probably be around for a while but only a shadow of its former self. taste along as there is a reasonable demand. Calls new cameras? Leica and maybe some company will issue a collector-classic lot at a ridiculously high price. Not to worry though, ther are enough good old and used cameras to last well into the next century.

The technology and gear have changed- progressed or not- depending on YOUR is YOUR tle on the matter. The aesthetics of great photography has not changed- all that good stuff like composition, craftsmanship, technical savvy, and a long list of visual elements all remain the same. Cameras do NOT .come with built-in creativity and hard work. That's up to y'all!

"FILM" will always be with us as an ACTION VERB and a NOUN. We still "film" events though it is digital video. People go to FILM schools to learn how to produce movies or become FILM-makers. Most products today are digital. People say- let's go see a FILM at the theater or on TV! Unless it is an old film, it ain't gonna be on film- for the most part! Don't do anything bad because somebody is gonna FILM you witht their cell phone! Those newfangled gadgets are too skinny to get the film into😀!

You just gotta know the right street corners to be standing out on at 3am. 😋

It's all old stock, but it's still out there in very limited and drying up availability. I hope at least half of what I could grab before catching unemployment works.

There's still at least one out there. Shanghai GP3 220. It's a 220 B&W that's said to be of poor quality.

I mentioned to my neighbour (the proper photographer) all what I've learnt so far from you guys about film and projectors. He said he used to do 3D negatives and have a special viewing lens or something, you'd put two negatives in and it would make the photo look 3D? I think i've translated that right.

San x

I develop my own film, but I don't wet-print because I don't have the space for a darkroom. I do scan my own negatives.

www.flickr.com/photos/aarongold/albums/72157712078748001

Aaron

No need for past tense. :) 120 film is all the same length, but the number of exposures depends on the size of negative the camera shoots. My Maimya 645 and RB67 both take the same spool of 120 film, but the 645 (6x4.5cm negative) gets 15-16 photos on that roll while the RB67 (6x7cm neg) gets about 10. There are also 6x6 and 6x9 medium-format cameras.

There was a 220 size film -- same roll size but longer length, and I think it eliminated the backing paper, but I'm not sure.

Aaron

Back in the early 90s, developing only (no prints, no cutting for my color film class) was $2 and I don't think slide was much more for process-only.

OK, just looked in the back of a 1990 Pop Photo mag... mail order E-6 slides were $3.50 mounted (cut and put in frames). Color print film was $6-$8 for 36 exposures and 4x8 prints.

Sounds expensive but remember you probably weren't shooting on a $2,000 camera with a $1,500 lens... more likely a $175 student rig. And unlike digital, it wasn't obsolete after 3 years. That's the beauty of film -- camera doesn't significantly affect image quality. When film got better -- and it did -- your pictures got better too, whether you had a brand-new Nikon F4 or a rusty Spotmatic.

Aaron

Most of you guys converted to digital cameras before I was even born. 1990's seems ancient. Its hard to imagine what it was like with no touch screen phones, digital photos and no internet. Internet has always been there for me.

San x

You had to say "I'll call you when I get there" then pull into a gas station to ask for directions so you could get there. Cars had coinholders so we could use pay phones. When I moved to the UK in the early 1990s they had pre-paid cards for their pay phones. Couldn't believe how modern that was!

A friend was going to be in Paris same time I was, so I got a message -- on an answering machine! -- saying "If you get this, meet us under the Eiffel Tower at 2pm on Tuesday." We had no idea how big the underside of the Eiffel Tower was, but we found each other.

From that trip: Here he is at a McDonald's in Paris (we were young, don't judge): www.flickr.com/photos/aarongold/49175534143/in/album-72157712079770811/

Me, same meal: www.flickr.com/photos/aarongold/49274984132/in/album-72157712079770811/

and his sort-of girlfriend, a half second after she said "If you take my picture I will kill you": www.flickr.com/photos/aarongold/49176256872/in/album-72157712079770811/

Here we are, same trip, steps at the Defense Arch, ignoring the thing about minimum focus distance: www.flickr.com/photos/aarongold/49275020647/in/album-72157712079770811/

...all on glorious film. Black and white and color on the same trip... that meant I was carrying two cameras.

Aaron

As a youngling, I think I played with this tech in one of those viewfinder disc thingies. It was from decades before I was born I believe.

"It was the best of times, it was the blurst of times." Be thankful you don't live in the era of rapidly disposable digital cameras. In less than a year your camera could basically be junk. Now that we're past 10mb standards it seems, we really don't have to worry about that anymore.

Before all this modern stuff, I lived in Mpls, a friend in Wisconsin, and another in Dallas. We all met in O'Hare to go to the Chicago Auto Show and to this day I have no idea how we coordinated that....LOL.

Due to costs, when shooting film, there was no screwing around. Every exposure was thought out, every mistake took money out of your pocket. The idea of spray and pray was horrifying, and most cameras were barely capable of it. I gave up photography during the end of the film era just due to cost. Digital adds a lot of "let's just try it" to the equation, which I love. The cameras are a lot more expensive, but over time, they come out ahead.

If you found Kodachrome, you'd be unable to develop it. IIRC, processing Kodachrome emits a deadly gas that must be handled which is beyond the ability of hobbyists.

The link to eBay is for color print film. IIRC, it was C-41 process. Again, IIRC, you could process it yourself but I never remember anybody doing so. What you can do and enjoy is printing from the negatives. I did that for months while I had my short career as a pro snapper.

Printing color is difficult unless you're doing so on a mass scale. It takes a few tries to get the color right which is OK if you're doing hundreds of prints as I was but expensive for a single print or two.

IMO, for a reasonable cost in film chemicals, paper and equipment, monochrome is the way to go. While I don't subscribe to the claim that the look of film is better than digital, I'll concede that a master printer using silver can produce monochrome prints that will impress even the most crabby critic.

I hope you're not pulling our leg here, OP! 😏. There has been quite the little film revival afoot the last few years, and you can see tons of clips on YouTube of wildly enthusiastic analogue fans geeking out on all kinds of 35mm, medium format, and large format film cameras. Reddit has a few sub forums devoted to film such as r\ analogue or r\AnalogueCommunity. There's brisk turnover in chat and posts of shots. The cohort seems to tend younger and more toward the joy and wonder of photography. It can be a welcome escape from the constant fussbudgeting for more megapixels, more fps, and moremoremore tech superpowers that sometimes dominates on the digital forums.

I myself fell for photography late, in the early\mid-2000s, and learned, shot, and published using a mechanical Nikon 35mm, used it for over a decade. Paid no attention to digital until about three years before the pandemic and wouldn't think of shutting the door on film completely. I do live in a huge megalopolis where dropoff color processing is still available, along with darkroom rental.

As you may have noticed, the OP’s third identity on this site has just been deleted and so it would seem that ‘her’ intentions are not straightforward….

The wide-eyed, "Golly, what was it like way back then????" tone of it all was just a tad overplayed. Naughty, naughty monkey. 🐒🐒🐒