I seem to be playing the devil's advocate this week. By way of explaining this, I'm at home, five days before I depart for Southeast Asia on one of my extended photo shoots, with no household chores to be done before I go (ours is an entirely Sagittarian environment, two humans and three cats shari the same astrological sign, admittedly in the latter case as far as we know as our felines don't have birth certificates so we go by the personalities and traits, most definitely December fur babies they are) and little to do but read, write, plan my next two months' travel adventures and daydream.
Now to return to the point...
A dear friend long involved in photography has in the past year moved fully into digital (Nikons) and mostly given up shooting film. He isn't especially pro or con one or the other but says he did so for convenience and ease of creating his images. According to him, while he "sort of" misses his black-and-white film work, his digi results are as good as anything he did before, shooting is easier, he enjoys what little post-processing he does, and he rejoices at having escaped the tyranny of the darkroom with its fixer smells, endlessly long print washing and time dedicated to fine-spotting his enlargements. In fact he says he misses absolutely none of that, except the frisson of not knowing what his results will be on the spot when he shoots an image. also the fun of shooting with is Leica iiig (which he still does, in a limited way).
He believes that the entire photo industry is now firmly poised on a great abyss - the time for mass (and massive) changes when the masses of once-dedicated film shooters give up on analog and defect to the big D. Firmly convinced that this is about to happen, he insists that NOW is the time for us to offload our film cameras while we can still get quite decent prices for them.
I tend to both agree and disagree (another hybrid Sagittarian trait). Certainly film prices here in Australia are so ridiculously high as to put off most older photographers who traditionally keep to a sensible budget but now find the costs of film and darkroom supplies so inflated as to be off-putting. Many of my friends (who are in their 60s and 70s and on reduced incomes but still share my love of older cameras and traditional darkrooms) agree with this sad summing up. If anything destroys the future of film shooting here in the Antipodes, it will be the price of film.
I got around this to some extent by hoarding in the late 2009 but am now almost out of chemistry and 35mm films (my remaining stocks of refrigerated 120 films would put your average camera shop circa 2005 to shame). Having recently relocated from Tasmania to Melbourne, last week I ventured into my favorite retail photo center to buy fresh developer and fixer and other odd bits of darkroom chemistry, and all but lost bowel control in shock when I realized the high prices for anything.
Fortunately I do my own D&P, as the same retailer wants the price of a kidney for processing one roll of slide film and two fingers from one's hand for color negative. And New Zealand prices it seems are up to 50% higher. Ooch!
So my query. Do you believe that NOW is the time to sell our stores of unused cameras? Will prices for secondhand gear crash to rock-bottom in the near future? With environmental destruction, climate change and all the other awfuls the media tells us are waiting at the end of the street, will film become as rare (and as expensive as) dinosaurs' teeth in the not-too-distant distance?
in 2012 I had >50-60 cameras but I'm now down to a more sensible but still oversupply of <20.
My Nikkormats and Nikkor lenses are worth only cents on the dollar and prices have not improved since 2010. My Contax G equipment would sell at the same prices or a little better as in 2012. Rolleiflex (oddly, not Rolleicords, which I consider as as good as the 'flexes) prices in Oz have skyrocketed and some Ebay sellers want megabucks for well-worn 1950s Automats with dents and missing bits. German 6x6 folders still command reasonable prices on the same auction site.
I've noted that, as for most overpriced things on Ebay, not much seems to sell. Now and then a pigeon bits the poison hook but on the auction saes are stagnant.
Bearing in mind what I said about Satan's Advocacy, what are your thoughts about all this?
