No matter how you slice it, compared to digital, it is....
• More expensive
Not when you take into account camera costs, especially if you replace your camera regularly. I gather that I spend less on film, processing, scanning and cameras than hobbyists who replace their digital rigs every 2-3 years.
Uh huh
Let's tilt this in film's favor. The user spends $5000 on digital camera bodies every 2 years, and sells the old bodies for 30% of cost. That works out to $1,650 per year.
Next, we assume you already have multiple high-quality film bodies, never need a CLA or repairs, never need replacements, never buy any film cameras for the fun of it.
How many rolls of film is that? Let's say you shoot half color print film, half B&W which you process at home, and no slide film, and your typical cost (including storage) averages $15/roll. The break-even point is around 110 rolls.
Obviously, the math changes drastically if you spend less on digital camera bodies, or buy analog cameras, or shoot larger film formats, or shoot slide film, or pay to develop and scan your negs, or make silver gelatin prints.
You can be more selective about what you photograph and thus shoot less film, but now you're paying a different cost -- opportunity cost, as you're not taking the shot. You're also spending lots of time developing and scanning your film.
By the way, I'm pretty sure the people who constantly buy new digital cameras are the same type of people who constantly buy film gear too, yes?
What does this mean? (Seriously, I am curious.)
With 35mm film, you're stuck with one ISO and type for multiple exposures. The camera doesn't measure or adjust white balance. Many have only manual focus or primitive autofocus; same for motor drives. Most don't have multiple exposure modes, or auto bracketing, or focus stacking, or aspect ratio crop in the viewfinder. Only a handful of film cameras have primitive stabilization. If you aren't proofing with a Polaroid, you can't check your exposure. If you shoot B&W film, you can't do things like add a red filter in post. The list goes on.
Meanwhile, you can easily choose to work slow, limit yourself to 1 ISO, 1 color profile, manual exposure, manual focus, and no exposure preview with digital. If that's how you want to work, and you don't use your gear that way, that isn't the gear's fault.
• Much, much easier to irrevocably screw up (see below)
Read: Harder
Harder = Less Practical. QED, yes?
• Lower quality (if you use any sensor larger than a smartphone)
Nope.
I've seen plenty of digital and analog prints in my time, and I have no qualms saying that 50mp cameras match 4x5 sheet film (with, as noted, the possible exception of contact prints). Even Micro 4/3 is pretty much on par with medium format film, and outperforms it in high-res mode.
• Worse for the environment
• Far more toxic if you work directly with chemistry
Can't comment here, since I don't know chemistry, but there are natural alternatives for developing, and I don't recall many deaths due to exposure to D-76.
The film has to be made somewhere, using large amounts of fairly nasty chemicals, and is sent to you in little metal containers inside little plastic containers that get thrown away. Kodak had to set up a $50 million cleanup trust, and promise to pay more, when it went bankrupt in
"Natural" doesn't mean "good for you or the environment." B&W chemistry won't burn your skin, but can still be bad for your health. That's why you should always ventilate your darkroom, wear gloves, and so on.
Digital certainly isn't 100% green, but its environmental footprint is much lower than film.
At best, you might be able to sucker a few rubes into thinking that film is somehow "special." It isn't. It's just an old, tired, toxic tech.
Well, the vast majority of us rubes are people who have shot film in the past. The "newbie hipster" is largely an invention of the film-hating crowd. Young people shooting film are in the minority, though I hope that will change, as the energy and innovation they have brought to film has fueled its resurgence.
Funny how most people use the "young people" argument as evidence that film is booming.
And no one seems to have any real numbers.
Anyway, my comment was not age-specific, and was oriented as much at clients as photographers.
Records: We agree, personally I think vinyl is a huge pain in the butt, but then again I'm not a music aficionado. But I know there are many valid arguments to be made in favor of its superiority.
I've also heard for all my life how Stradivarius violins sound better than modern ones. Guess what happens in a blind test?
And that's a big part of the reason I like film. Digital: Point, click, peep. Done. Easy. Yawn.
The things that digital makes easy, and film makes hard, are not the things that make a photo great. They just screw up your workflow.
What makes a photo great is the selection of the subject; the composition; the tonality, and so forth. I.e. it's the photographer, not the gear, that is responsible for a great image. None of that changes by using an analog camera.
Good News that, film is coming back .
Ugh, this nonsense again.
No, film is not "coming back." Like vinyl, it's a shadow of its former self.
Actually, it is. The market bottomed out about 15 years ago -- but now it's growing, to the point that Kodak is bringing back emulsions it had discontinued.
Again, I seriously doubt those types of claims, and I see no real evidence that the film market is growing. The only data point I'm seeing is that Kodak's revenues collapsed years ago, did not recover, and are still mostly drifting down.
Why bother manipulating digital when a phone can do it in the blink of an eye?
Now you're getting it.
Film, on the other hand, takes all that away. It requires genuine skill -- and skill that cannot be (easily) manipulated by a machine.
lol... Yeah, not so much.
Countless millions of unskilled photographers used film for decades. Point, click, shoot, drop off film, boring. Most people do that today, too. A big part of the "film revival" in the past few years are low- or no-skill cameras, like instant or disposables.
Andy Warhol took thousands of photos using instant film. Where was the skill? It was in his eye, not in choosing between Rodinal and D-76.
And again, if you want digital photography to be hard? No problem. Use prime lenses, manual focus, manual exposure, tripod, turn off the screen, stick to one ISO, shoot RAW.
To quote JFK: We do these things "not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills."
JFK wasn't saying that "we should make it harder to get to the moon." No one thinks that NASA engineers today should use slide rules instead of computers, because "hard is better than easy."
Plus, yeah, he was fibbing a bit. JFK wanted to put an American on the Moon because the US was losing the "Space Race," and NASA thought the US could get there before the Russkies.
