How much film for an overseas trip?

[Poisson Du Jour]

If your consumption of film on previous trips has been conservative by your own admission, you will not serve yourself by taking or buying boxes and boxes of film, here in Australia, en route or in the US, thinking things have improved since the last trip. Get a grip on figures. Start by exploring Melbourne and surroundings -- places you have not been to, for 40 days now, with two cameras. Record your film consumption. Ta-da! Probably under 20 rolls between the two cameras. For photographers with a keen eye for preferential subjects and zero waste, they could do 40 days on 5 or 6 rolls of 36 exposure film. Also, unless you print every single photo from all of those 36 exposure rolls, it is pretty much a waste.

My 2016 trip to Hokkaido consumed just 3 rolls of 120 format film over 2 weeks. The smaller 35mm format encourages waste by dint of the number of exposures which very few people can use quickly and effectively. Most sacrifice the remaining after 12 or 24 exposures -- even that is overly generous.

 

[RattyMouse]

My 2016 trip to Hokkaido consumed just 3 rolls of 120 format film over 2 weeks.

3 rolls? That's about an hours work for me in Japan.

 

[Poisson Du Jour]

3 rolls? That's about an hours work for me in Japan.

My niece snapped about 250 on her iPhone at the time.

 

[klownshed]

In my personal experience, the more photos of a location/subject I take, the less likely I am to get a keeper.

One of the reasons I love film is because it slows me down. I want to spend time over a shot, not just snap away. Quality over quantity.

I also would hate to have to deal with dozens of rolls of film on my return.

If I was antcicipating having to use so many rolls I’d use a digital camera instead. The benefits of film to me would be lost having to deal with so many snaps.