Getting into film

TheBigYin said:
FWIW I think that it's cheap compared to digital too - that's not my prime reason for using it, of course, but it's certainly cheaper than a couple of grand for a new body every couple of years. However, if the OP was complaining that £55 for a Nikon EM and lens was too expensive, then the per-film cost is always going to be expensive as well - especially compared to the running costs of his already purchased Canon 500D.
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I agree with all of that. Digital compacts offer a lot of bangs for your buck when used for screen sharing but no way are dSLRs and the hard and software to maximise their potential 'cheap'. It's just that people are used to seeing computer technology as a standing overhead.
 
Well - last year was my first year with a digital slr. I decided to do a photo-365, so shot lots and lots of frames, tried all sorts of different techniques and at the end of the year my slr camera's frame count was 5570. I also shot 1244 frames on my point and shoot compact. That's 6814 frames - call it 189 rolls of 36. Assuming I bought a big pile of Reala from the bloke on ebay at £20 for 20 rolls and had them processed at Tesco's for £2 each roll, that's 189 rolls at £3 a pop - £567 (not counting my time and petrol in taking the films in for processing). More than the 450D cost, and to be honest, would have been a poorer learning experience for me, not getting instant feedback and access to settings via EXIF. But - that was a very exceptional year for me, and to be honest i'd not have attempted to shoot in that way on film. I'm glad I did use digital in that way, as I learned a heck of a lot, and I think I improved accordingly. Also - burried in the figures earlier were a couple of "product shot" shoots for my customers which more than paid for the camera in any case :LOL:

So - I guess it's just down to where you want to spend the money - do you put it out at the start as a capital investment, or do you lash it out as a running cost. Think of it as Buying your car, or contract hire...

Truth is, photography is not intrinsically a massively expensive hobby - it CAN be - if you decide you need the latest and greatest, or if you fly around the world for locations, or if you're building sets and hiring models. However, for the way I shoot at normal times, as I say, a couple of rolls of film a week, or maybe a hundred or so clicks of the digital aren't going to break the bank and are hardly likely to wear out the digital just yet!. It's certainly cheaper than feeding my cycling habit...
 
TheBigYin said:
Well - last year was my first year with a digital slr. I decided to do a photo-365, so shot lots and lots of frames, tried all sorts of different techniques and at the end of the year my slr camera's frame count was 5570. I also shot 1244 frames on my point and shoot compact. That's 6814 frames - call it 189 rolls of 36.
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The best thing about film is you would have taken loads less photo's, because every sutter release has a cost you think about i much much more and as a result I get a much better % of keepers on film than I do digital.

Both formats have advantages and disadvantages, fortunately film cameras are so cheap you can have a go by spending less than 20 quid most of which you will get back should you sell. My OM10 with 50mm f1.8 cost me 7 quid on the bay and even if they stop mking film I won't get rid of it!
 
a1ex2001 said:
The best thing about film is you would have taken loads less photo's, because every sutter release has a cost you think about i much much more and as a result I get a much better % of keepers on film than I do digital.
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For my general shooting Alex, i'd agree 100%. However, for the kinds of things I was experimenting with, I pretty much needed to try lots of shots - I basically started from scratch with really learning the interactions of aperture and DOF, shooting the same shot 30 times with different combinations etc. I have to admit, before I did this kind of thing, I was aware of the theory, but I've always been the kind of person that it only sinks in when i actually do an experiment and prove it to myself. That's me - it's how I am :shrug:

Another thing that I did that burned a lot of shutter depressions was messing around with off camera flash (without a flash-meter that'd just have been a complete waste of film tbh...) and self-portraits.

To be honest it was nice to shoot without caring for the cost. It's not made me shutter-happy in normal shooting, although I do now think that film stocks cheap compared to re-visiting and re-shooting, so I will happily bracket my shots - if a shot's really worth a frame it's worth 3 to be sure.

The main thing that all that shooting did for me though, was helped train my eye for seeing a shot. Whereas before I'd walk past a dozen things before even raising my camera to my eye, because I knew I could experiment i'd stop, look, shoot it for practice at least, and if i didn't like it, i'd delete back at home. Some (most) didn't work - but the odd one did, and that helped me think more about shooting in the future.

Around about half way into the year, I started hankering for a film slr that would work well alongside the 450D, and eventually settled on the EOS-3. I still think that this is my favourite camera, despite also ending up with 2 Holgas, a Voigtlander Perkeo, a Canonet QL19, FED3b, a Kodak point and shoot and a Canon A-1 kit. Top and bottom of it is, I ENJOY SHOOTING ON FILM. I like the solid mechanical feel of film cameras, I enjoy the sense of anticipation of what will actually be there on the film, I enjoy the whole routine of processing the films. Indeed, if I had to send my films away for processing, i'd probably go back to digital... It's not being tight about the cost - it's a feeling of having been in control of the process from the selection of the film, all the way to the production of the final print (albeit scanned and inkjetted rather than wet-printed). The digital camera is great for what I want it for - work, but if I'm going shooting for myself, for pleasure, then you'll see me standing in front of the 'fridge, choosing which rolls of film to take ;)
 
TheBigYin said:
Well - last year was my first year with a digital slr. I decided to do a photo-365, so shot lots and lots of frames, tried all sorts of different techniques and at the end of the year my slr camera's frame count was 5570. I also shot 1244 frames on my point and shoot compact. That's 6814 frames - call it 189 rolls of 36. Assuming I bought a big pile of Reala from the bloke on ebay at £20 for 20 rolls and had them processed at Tesco's for £2 each roll, that's 189 rolls at £3 a pop - £567 (not counting my time and petrol in taking the films in for processing). More than the 450D cost, and to be honest, would have been a poorer learning experience for me, not getting instant feedback and access to settings via EXIF. But - that was a very exceptional year for me, and to be honest i'd not have attempted to shoot in that way on film. I'm glad I did use digital in that way, as I learned a heck of a lot, and I think I improved accordingly. Also - burried in the figures earlier were a couple of "product shot" shoots for my customers which more than paid for the camera in any case :LOL:

So - I guess it's just down to where you want to spend the money - do you put it out at the start as a capital investment, or do you lash it out as a running cost. Think of it as Buying your car, or contract hire...

Truth is, photography is not intrinsically a massively expensive hobby - it CAN be - if you decide you need the latest and greatest, or if you fly around the world for locations, or if you're building sets and hiring models. However, for the way I shoot at normal times, as I say, a couple of rolls of film a week, or maybe a hundred or so clicks of the digital aren't going to break the bank and are hardly likely to wear out the digital just yet!. It's certainly cheaper than feeding my cycling habit...
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...you forgot to mention all the lost time in sorting out the digital shots, PP and archiving? Some digital guys take 5000 shots on holiday, I'm a bit more fussy and probably use about 4 or 5 rolls of film.
 
excalibur2 said:
...you forgot to mention all the lost time in sorting out the digital shots, PP and archiving?
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Didn't mention it, as to be honest, apart from paying jobs I don't cost my time... it's a hobby, and as such, I enjoy the time spent, be it behind the camera when I can be, or looking at and working with the results of the shooting on the computer later.

For the most intensively shutter heavy bits i did, 80-90% of the shots could be deleted at a first glance. the remaining 10-20% were quickly ranked from 1-5* in lightroom again in a quick scan through. I'd then restrict myself to 5* shots and see if i'd got what I needed, pp'ing only those. If not,i'd work back through 4*, 3*... and if by then i'd not got what I needed, I'd re-shoot and try again... hence the thousands of shots. I may not be very good, but i'm thorough :)
 
The biggest difference is a film camera is 'free' - you pay £20 or £200 and you can expect to get the money back when/if you sell it. There comes a point where film and processing costs begin to match the outlay on an equivalent quality DSLR but I reckon you'd have to be pressing plenty of shutter to make the mark.

Depending on your method the differences are even greater. The technology to match the quality of a good 16 x 12 B&W silver image on a secondhand enlarger would be prohibitively expensive. For screen sharing there's no contest, for everything else film has been consigned to history prematurely.
 
People use film because they enjoy doing something,artists paint ,golfers go for long walks.it all has some sort of outlay in cash but do it for a pastime.Cant knock that.
 
try your local charity shops, they have loads of film gear. I recently bought a EOS 1000, Olympus OM30, and a Canon Program AE-1 for £5 each. The last two came with a 50mm 1.8 and all had a camera bag.
 
hsuffyan said:
try your local charity shops, they have loads of film gear. I recently bought a EOS 1000, Olympus OM30, and a Canon Program AE-1 for £5 each. The last two came with a 50mm 1.8 and all had a camera bag.
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Well I only see a few crappy P&S in a few places.
 
excalibur2 said:
Well I only see a few crappy P&S in a few places.
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agreed, but i have seen quite a few SLR's in the mix, also the staff usually put a lot of the older stuff in the back because they arent aware that those are the ones that are valuable.

I saw this really cool and funky 8mm brownie video camera too, but i managed to stick to the slr's.
 
david1701 said:
I wanna have a go at 8mm, don't you need a machine to 'print' the film?
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No, 8mm film is usually a positive process, although you can get neg too. 8mm is fantastic stuff, you can have it converted to any format you like and as with stills, the bottom fell out the market with the advent of video and digi, meaning you can pick up some superb gear for a song.

Through a good lens 8mm looks fantastic. These guys are the biz:
http://www.widescreen-centre.co.uk/Catalogue/Motion_picture_division.html

This looks like it was shot on Super 8: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MKGBmMoWbKM
 
I have a porn film on super 8, "Hot Rod" from 1971..:cool:
Unfortunately the projector rubber belts keep snapping, the film stops and the light burns a hole in it.
Banging colours though..
 
LMAO


Is home dev easy like it is for proper film. I had just kinda assumed the chemistry would be the same cos 35mm was movie film

oh and the print thing was cos I watched inglorious basterds and they said they needed to 'print' their fake anti Nazi film
 
Standard Ektachrome 100D Super 8 is E-6 process you
just need the right sort of developing stuff/chems as I am not sure if a 50ft (3 min) roll of super 8 will fit in a Patterson System 4 tank for example. Kodak provide datasheets on developing it on their motion film site. Tap in 'Kodak motion super 8' into google and go to the first site. Just have a look around.

Negative film is slightly harder these days with super 8 as Kodak has not produced the positive print film for it for years so if your looking to project don't bother with negative. There is a place in Germany that
can still do negative super 8 prints, its about 30 euros

http://www.andecfilm.de/en/e_s8_neg_pos.htm

Luckily, Kodak has just released Ektachrome 100D in super 8 which has been used in 35mm and 16mm for quite a few years and is apparently a massive improvement over the the now discontinued Ektachrome 64T which was mean't to be a replacement for the legendary Kodachrome 40T but didn't really catch on. Sadly Kodak Plus-X is also discontinued in super 8 which is bad as its got some quite unique effects that have been well used in dark, moody music videos etc for years. (But some other companies a bound to respool 35mm still film cassettes like they do with Velvia 50.)

BTW if you don't know 1 50ft cartridge of super 8 lasts only 3 minutes.
 
Agfa used to do Super 8 and when I shot it in the late 80s/early 90s it worked out at £5 a roll including processing if you bought 4! The tones were a bit cooler than Kodak, as per most Agfa stuff but quite pleasing. 8mm is used quite a bit for commercial purposes and the prices have gone up.

Incidentally, serious cinematographers could teach still photographers a thing or two about exposure. They normally test an individual film batch and hone development down to a fraction of a stop before shooting.
 
The BBC use Super 8 quite a lot for visual effect and apparently when scanned at 4K resolution it actually looks quite good.

I wish that prices were that cheap nowadays, about £20 is the cheapest I have found for the film and the development and about £30 with telecine. I have been looking into getting a super 8 camera for ages but its the high film price etc has made me delay it. Decent cameras like the Canon Auto Zoom 518 usually go for about £20 though so its tempting to just get one.
 
Kodak used to do a special 'E-8' process kit for home development of super 8, not sure if they still do it now but some company like Tetanal might. There again it used standard E-6 chemicals so just have a look on Kodaks site. You may just need a bigger developing tank to fit it all in.
 
if anyone is interested in 8mm, i know the charity shops had 2 working models at £3 each, so i'd be happy to pick one up and post it out at cost.
 
hsuffyan said:
if anyone is interested in 8mm, i know the charity shops had 2 working models at £3 each, so i'd be happy to pick one up and post it out at cost.
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Out of interest, do you know what either of the camera's were?! I'd be interested if you can let me know and I'll be able to take a look at either specs or a manual!

Never worked with 8mm before. :naughty:
 
Dan Canon Kid said:
hi i currently have a dslr but i am looking to get a film camera. does anyone know a cheap good quality model ??

thanks, Dan :)
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Try also looking around the car boot slaes. I picked up a Canon EOS5 with battery grip for £25 in Wales a couple of years ago. It was and still is in excellnt cosmetic and working condition and has been a very faithful friend ever since. I don't think I'd ever get rid of it.

Plus if your DSLR is a Canon, all your lenses should fit and work just fine. I've used it with pleny of different EF fit lenses, including some of the later fixed focal letngth IS ones, with no problems and great results too. I imagine the EOS5 was a pretty expensive camera when it came out so the quality is very much there.

As for processing take a look here
 
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