Well, in my opinion, anyone doing event photography on film is nuts, when you need to shoot hundreds or thousands of shots digital is the way to go. OTOH, in my personal photography, I figure that if I can not get it with 12 shots, I am not going to get it.
What I am saying here is that normally, I am going to be processing one or two rolls of 120, not 50 at a time. Since I am retired, broke, worse off than the typical college student money wise, I have to do things on the cheap. I normally buy about 10 rolls of film at a time. I process in Rodinal 1:100, stop in plain water, and use my hypo one shot, I do not shoot enough to make it worthwhile storing used hypo. That comes out to about $2.50 roll. I just got a darkroom set up again to do enlarging, but then came down with this nasty bug, so do not have numbers for that., but since my shooting budget is in the order of $20-$30/mo you can be sure I am not going to be spending a lot. Yes, you can have fun with photography for that little.
Setting up a dark room can cost anything from nothing, many people have been given a whole dark room just to get it out of the way, to many thousands of dollars. But with used equipment you should be able to set something up for about $200-$250. An old rule of thumb was to budget about as much for your darkroom as you spent on your camera outfit.
In the end, it is not how much you spent, but how much fun you had that counts.
What I am saying here is that normally, I am going to be processing one or two rolls of 120, not 50 at a time. Since I am retired, broke, worse off than the typical college student money wise, I have to do things on the cheap. I normally buy about 10 rolls of film at a time. I process in Rodinal 1:100, stop in plain water, and use my hypo one shot, I do not shoot enough to make it worthwhile storing used hypo. That comes out to about $2.50 roll. I just got a darkroom set up again to do enlarging, but then came down with this nasty bug, so do not have numbers for that., but since my shooting budget is in the order of $20-$30/mo you can be sure I am not going to be spending a lot. Yes, you can have fun with photography for that little.
Setting up a dark room can cost anything from nothing, many people have been given a whole dark room just to get it out of the way, to many thousands of dollars. But with used equipment you should be able to set something up for about $200-$250. An old rule of thumb was to budget about as much for your darkroom as you spent on your camera outfit.
In the end, it is not how much you spent, but how much fun you had that counts.