Film is still king in my son's school

My boy is taking a photography class at Curtis high school near Tacoma, WA. Boy was I surprised when he came home with a camera borrowed from school. It was fully manual 35mm Pentax with real Freestyle EDU 100 film in it. This is standard equipment for the kids in class. Not only did he bring home the camera but he brought home a negative sleeve containing film he had exposed and developed in class.

The teacher is instructing the kids in the fundamentals of photography and there's not a digicam in sight! Oh, and Andrew's first negatives have nice density if not a little grainier than I would like. The biggest plus, the pictures are really nice! He scanned them on my film scanner ( I know, a really bad thing for the son of an APUG'er to do) but he and I are going to print them using enlarger and paper tonight.

There's hope for film yet

That rocks!

The photo program is almost entirely analog at my school too. The level 3 students take 6 out of their 18 week semester to do digital stuff (but it is all slides scanned, no digital cameras). Then when you get up to the photo 4 or AP levels you can choose to do whatever you'd like, but everyone still chooses to do analog! Our school also buys a variety of films for everyone- APX100 & 400, Tmax 100 & 400, PanF+, and HP5+.
-Grant

My son's community college dismantled the darkroom behind the journalism lab: too pricey and not ventilated safely.
In the basic photo class I took there we scanned and manipulated negatives in a computer lab. We had to scrounge for our own cameras and film.
Is this a function of living in California?

mdohoney said:

My son's community college dismantled the darkroom behind the journalism lab: too pricey and not ventilated safely.
In the basic photo class I took there we scanned and manipulated negatives in a computer lab. We had to scrounge for our own cameras and film.
Is this a function of living in California?

Click to expand...

I think so. I went through the public school system in so. Cal in the 70's That was back when the school system still had a little money. We still had to provide our own cameras although my school bought me plenty of Plus-X.

The school district where my children attend in the Tacoma, WA area is small but has a fair amount of grant money around. Fortunately for us, they spent some of it on Pentax K-1000's.

I'm going to circumvent the circumstances, at least for a few of us. I'm teaching an after-school activities pinhole photography class (6 hours total) to 7-10 year olds, probably no more than 10 of them. The total 'grant' was $50- bought chemistry, a changing bag, beakers and a light baffled tank. The store gave me lots of black film canisters to build cameras with. Low budget magic and a far cry from Pentax! You may tell from my descriptions that I'm just beginning with darkroom stuff. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Lemme know what you need...

mdohoney said:

I'm going to circumvent the circumstances, at least for a few of us. I'm teaching an after-school activities pinhole photography class (6 hours total) to 7-10 year olds, probably no more than 10 of them. The total 'grant' was $50- bought chemistry, a changing bag, beakers and a light baffled tank. The store gave me lots of black film canisters to build cameras with. Low budget magic and a far cry from Pentax! You may tell from my descriptions that I'm just beginning with darkroom stuff. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Click to expand...

I've been doing some of the same thing- teaching pinhole photography, but to High School kids. I have loads of info & web links, so let me know what you're looking for. It is SO rewarding to see the kids latch on to an "old" technology & treat it as if it were something completely new!

SchwinnParamount said:

My boy is taking a photography class at Curtis high school near Tacoma, WA. Boy was I surprised when he came home with a camera borrowed from school. It was fully manual 35mm Pentax with real Freestyle EDU 100 film in it. This is standard equipment for the kids in class.
There's hope for film yet

Click to expand...

Is that a public high school? The public schools here don't even have funding to buy new books for the library -- let alone cameras, film and darkroom equipment.


Good for you and your kid.