I really want to get into the 35mm film photography, I can find Cannon AE-1 for ok price, but film prices just keep going up.
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Can we talk about film?
- Thread starter mollyc
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i have read multiple sources saying that on an inflation basis, film now is fairly cheap. it seems expensive because it was rock bottom prices for a few years during the transition to digital.
It has really shot up this year. Maybe it was underpriced prior to that, but it hurts to pay nearly double what I paid last year for the exact same film stock. Or, worse, not be able to get it at all. I just hope rising costs don't lead to any manufacturers stopping production.
here is an interesting article about the price of film over the past few decades.
silvergrainclassics.com
Film Prices Analyzed: Is Film Too Expensive?
In recent years, film has become considerably more expensive. Many think that it has even become too expensive, and feel ripped off by manufacturers like Kodak and Fuji. But how much did prices really rise, and why? Are we paying too much? A look at film prices in perspective.
Molly, on your two photos-
First of all if the off one is underexposed as you think, the color shift on scanning might make sense.
If underexposed, you have less density for the scanner to work with and it has less reference when automatically setting the color balance. If in doubt, always overexpose color negative film.
Ektar is still a bit touchier about exposure than Portra or one of the consumer films, but it does in general tolerate being overexposed by one stop or so decently well.
With that said, with almost any troubleshooting on something like this, the negatives themselves can tell a lot more than a scan...
First of all if the off one is underexposed as you think, the color shift on scanning might make sense.
If underexposed, you have less density for the scanner to work with and it has less reference when automatically setting the color balance. If in doubt, always overexpose color negative film.
Ektar is still a bit touchier about exposure than Portra or one of the consumer films, but it does in general tolerate being overexposed by one stop or so decently well.
With that said, with almost any troubleshooting on something like this, the negatives themselves can tell a lot more than a scan...
yeah, i just don't know how to read negatives....especially color.
i need a lesson in that!
Even as a poor high school student in the 1970s I could afford to shoot all the film I wanted. I would buy 35 mm black and white film in 100 foot rolls and re-spool it onto reusable 35mm cartridges. I would process the negatives myself in a daylight tank. You can still buy this stuff and it is still dirt cheap. A good film SLR with manual focus sells for as low as $35 today.
That said, why bother with 35 mm? If I were to shoot film again, I'd want to use a kind of film and camera that would allow me to do work I could not do with my current Nikon DSLRs.
I might buy a 120 roll film camera to get a kind of smooth grainless tone or more likely I'd shoot 4x5 view cameras and try to recreate the style of someone like Bret Weston, Edward Weston's son. You just can't get that with a small format camera.
4x5 film is not as expensive as you think. Yes it is about $1 per frame but no onw shoots hundreds of frames. You shot 3 or 5 frames
I hope to get a medium format sometime in the next year. Well, I do have a Holga, but that's a bit different.
I personally like 35mm because I can use my Nikon lenses on my Nikon film camera. I don't need the resolution of MF or LF, although I definitely understand they offer different opportunities for framing, DOF, thought process. I rarely print larger than 2' x 3' even with digital, so needing extra resolution for what ends up largely being seen only on a computer screen isn't a big driver for me personally.
I want to see ALL the film formats make a good comeback. I can scan 35mm at home with my digital cameras, and I have dabbled in bw development.
Shooting 35mm film gives me a different experience than shooting a full frame digital camera, and what you (might/would) look for in shooting film isn't necessarily the same thing I look for. There is room for everyone. 🙂
Interesting point. I’ve thought about getting into a bigger format, and may do so, but in response to your (rhetorical) question I’d answer that I fell into some 35mm gear for virtually nothing and I think the photos look great. It may be technically inferior to 120 but I’m certainly not a good enough photographer to come within a mile of the limits of 35mm.
EDIT: WHOOPS! Sorry @kenoh I was reading through this thread on my first cup of coffee and in my uncaffeinated head I thought it was a post by @mollyc. Apologies to both of you for getting you switched up!
It's good that you're thinking that way, though!
Color film by default was formulated for daylight as far as the color balance is concerned. There are/were some variants, such as Ektachrome 160 ASA Tungsten film made to be shot under 3200K light. I used to like to shoot indoor location portraits with this, lighting the subject with strobes that had deep orange tungsten filters on them, so they were rendered with accurate color, but light coming in from outdoors in the background had a blue tint.
Once you're shooting film you'll see all kinds of possibilities like this, a way to work with film that has a fixed color balance. How daylight film sees fluorescent light vs tungsten vs midday sunset vs sunset vs dusk are all obvious. But then you also start to see subtle shifts, such as the color of open shade under a leafy tree where there's lots of green bouncing around, vs open shade on the shadow side of a white building where the light isn't green, but it may be a little blue especially in the summer or at higher elevations.
I'm so glad you had good luck developing your negs! As long as the plastic reels are working for you, keep using them. I never liked them myself, and found that the heavy stainless Nikor reels were magic. I could load a reel so fast with those lol, important when coming back from an event on deadline ⏱️ with multiple rolls of film.
did you mean to put this in the potd thread? 🙂
Well thank you. Very flattering for me, deeply offensive to suggest you mixed Mollyc up with a fat furry Scottish gremlin. lol...
Who has a favorite color film stock? So far I have used Portra 400, Gold 200, Ektar, and Fuji Superia Xtra 400.
I wasn't a fan of the Fuji. I'm hit or miss on Portra and loved my Gold 200 and Etkar rolls, but they are faster and not always well suited for general purpose. One roll of Portra I loved the tones on....other rolls were kind of meh, but they were also taken in dingy, drab winter, so maybe not the best time....I see so much Portra 400 that I love. I know that the photos I see with it that I like so much are probably two stops overexposed. But when I shot the Gold and Ektar, they were at box speed with beautiful colors.
I'm not adventurous enough to try slide film yet, so sticking to c-41 stuff. I have 4-5 rolls of Portra in a drawer that will go to the beach with me, and have a roll of Gold in the half frame right now. I'll definitely take Ektar to the beach when we go next month. Should I try anything else?
I wasn't a fan of the Fuji. I'm hit or miss on Portra and loved my Gold 200 and Etkar rolls, but they are faster and not always well suited for general purpose. One roll of Portra I loved the tones on....other rolls were kind of meh, but they were also taken in dingy, drab winter, so maybe not the best time....I see so much Portra 400 that I love. I know that the photos I see with it that I like so much are probably two stops overexposed. But when I shot the Gold and Ektar, they were at box speed with beautiful colors.
I'm not adventurous enough to try slide film yet, so sticking to c-41 stuff. I have 4-5 rolls of Portra in a drawer that will go to the beach with me, and have a roll of Gold in the half frame right now. I'll definitely take Ektar to the beach when we go next month. Should I try anything else?
I'll be honest, I can't stand color neg film. I worked at a newspaper when we switched from Fujichrome to Fujicolor, and suddenly I wasn't producing the images I saw when I was at an assignment. Color neg always seemed inaccurate to me. Somehow flat and green and lacking depth, intrusive to perception. With slide film, I fell into the image and saw a 2-D reproduction of what I had seen with my own eyes.
I know this doesn't answer your question. All of this is just to say I'm eager to see what you shoot once you do try slide film. Maybe you should shoot some chromes alongside your color neg, and just send them out to a lab to be processed, that way you're not worried about doing E-6.
Color neg is like B/W: expose for the shadows. Slide film is more like digital: expose for the highlights.
At the end of the day, good old Velvia serves me well.
I've actually come around to liking Velvia 100 as well as any of the current line-up. I still have a very few rolls of the original Velvia(RVP), and I find that I can get Velvia 100 to behave more like original Velvia than the current Velvia 50(RVP50).
I wish we could still get E100GX, as E100G/E100 is a bit too cool for my taste, but shot through an 81A I like it a lot as just a great all around well behaved film.
One of my favorite negative films is the long-discontinued Portra 400UC, or its later name of Ultra Color 400(you could actually buy it at Walmart under that name at one time). I honestly kind of quit shooting negative film in large volume when that went away, although Portra 160 and 400 are about as technically perfect as color negative stock can get.
Velvia is a standard E-6 or "Ektachrome" process film, although Fuji calls it CR-56. Several different emulsions have come and gone over the years now. Apparently(and I hadn't realized this-I hadn't actually bought any in a while) Velvia 50 is the only one that is sold in the US these days.
I think you might be thinking of Kodachrome, which was discontinued in 2006 or 2007 and the processing discontinued in 2010 officially(unofficially January 2011).
Kodachrome was an early technology color film. All films are black and white films, but modern color film(C-xx process negative or E-x process positive) have the color dyes put into the film during manufacture and during development you basically get rid of everything that's not a dye.
To give kind of a long rambling answer, if you'll forgive me, here's kind of a progression of how film is developed starting with exposed silver halide
1. Exposed silver halides get reduced to elemental silver by the developer
2. If B&W film, the unexposed silver halides get dissolved out("fixed") and the final negative results
Color negative film adds an additional step-the film is "bleached", which removes elemental silver and leaves only the dyes(color couplers) visible
E-6 film is developed, bleached, then "fogged"(chemically). This "exposes" all the left over silver halide, which is then developed, bleached out, and leaves behind the image.
Kodachrome(K-14) does not integrate any color couplers, and it actually involves 14 separate steps. In particular, each of the three color layer is optically fogged individually, and then after doing so the dyes/color couplers are added in as that layer is developed. At its heyday, there were maybe about 100 labs in the world that could do Kodachrome onsite. The lab I use to use in Louisville, Fulltone Photo, actually did do it back in the 80s and 90s, but of course hadn't in years. In the late 90s/early 2000s, there were 3 labs in the world, and by the mid-2000s Dwayne's Photo in Parson's KS was the only surviving one. Kodak quit manufacturing the chemistry a few years after they quit making the film, which brought development to an end.
BTW, I used Kodachrome some back in the day. It worked for certain subjects, but it wasn't one of my favorite emulsions.
yes, but velvia 100 was discontinued last year. 😞
FUJICHROME Velvia 100 | Fujifilm [United States]
yes, but velvia 100 was discontinued last year. 😞
FUJICHROME Velvia 100 | Fujifilm [United States]
www.fujifilm.com
I remember the discussions now. Guess I'd just not had a reason to buy any and had been out of the loop
I need to email my contact in Japan who I'd bought LF film from in the past and see if he is still able to get it.
I have many Kodachrome slides that are still as rich and vibrant as the day they were processed. It was my favorite film to shoot. It did require a steep learning curve but it was worth it.