Above Nikon F6 35mm film SLR.
I was running out of film the other day so looked to renew my stock. I was stunned by the prices which seem to have risen substantially. For example the cheapest roll of Fuji Velvia Slide film I could find was £18:50 for a single roll!! These days I use Kodak Ektar 100 which is a superb colour negative film and the cheapest I could find that for was £9:95 per roll. So I bought 20 rolls which cost me just under £200. When I factor in processing charges this means that every time I press the shutter it costs me around 50p. The argument is that film cameras are much cheaper than digital ones because most are bought S/H. However since I use a Nikon F6, which I bought brand new before they stopped making them that doesn't apply to me. And since I shoot digital as well, I'm not making much of a saving shooting film. So it does cost me to create images that need a lot of work from start from finish and don't objectively look as good as high end digital images.
The other thing is film isn't really film anymore. Before digital took over I shot all my stock work on colour slide (transparency) film and I had to send the actual slide to the picture libraries who marketed my work. So, these days my film shots have to be scanned and digitised, which adds extra cost by having a lab do it or I have to buy my own scanner. So as well as the expense there is all the extra stuff involved as well. So I thought to myself, why do I do this?
The answer, obviously, is that I enjoy it, but exactly why is that? Well I seem to get a perverse pleasure from the 'mystery' of chemical photography. I can't see immediately what I have, though that doesn't stop me looking at the back of the camera every time I take a shot!! I can't really predict how the image will turn out either because of the variables involved in processing, i.e. time of day, heat of chemicals etc. can all contribute to colour shifts in the finished result. Then there is what a scanner will make of what it is scanning. So there are quite a few variables between pressing the shutter and getting to the results above.
Now I know that those images above are not what I saw in my viewfinder in terms of colour balance, but for me that's part of the charm and the creative process. All of the images certainly work and no one would know that they were shot on film rather than digital. But all of them were worked on in Photoshop, to a greater or lesser degree.
I also like that fact that I end up with a physical product. In my case this is a sheet of negatives. Yes if you hold them up to the light they look a bit strange, with a reversed image and that orange cast, but what I have is not a load of numbers stored on a hard disk that need electricity to be viewed. I did at one time shoot slides on a Fuji 6 x 9 medium format camera and I could hold a 6cm by 9cm picture in my hand. I currently have many thousand transparencies (probably close to 500,000) stored in my loft studio. Since they are kept warm and dry they look exactly the same as when I first got them. Some date from the early eighties, so many are nearly 40 years old.
Finally, shooting on film was how I started in photography so shooting on film reconnects me to those exciting days when I became passionate about creating images with a camera. I can never get back that early enthusiasm, when I quickly became obsessed with the whole process and decided that I would do everything I could to earn a living from it, but it reminds me of how and why I ended up as a professional photographer.
Now I like to think that somehow my film photography is different to my digital photography, that in some sense this is my personal form of image creation. But in reality this is rather a fanciful notion. I send my film work (after scanning and editing to my picture libraries and I fact I get a higher success rate from my film work than from digital.
For example, below are some of my best selling shots from my best performing picture library and half of those were shot on film.
Film certainly has become fashionable again and while it certainly isn't going to be any kind of competitor to digital again, it has a certain retro chic that means it will survive as a means of photographic expression. Besides scanning has meant that film shots can stand beside beside digital anyway. Yes I know that 35mm film shots can never compete with high end digital, but what film offers me as a photographer far outweighs those considerations. I enjoy it, it satisfies me creatively and it reminds me of my early days exploring photography. And as long as film and chemical processing still exist I will continue to do it.
