Is there really a strong interest in film photography?

[faberryman]

Maybe film companies should stop introducing cheap crap “film fad” sploitation cameras?

Why? They seem to be serving their intended market.

Something like a Nettar with a few modern trimmings, I’d be all over the moment it landed.
Electronic shutter, possibility of optionally using your iPhone as a viewfinder, range finder and light meter, made of tough durable and light plastic and serviceability are just a few possible examples of things not readily possible with old cameras.

It would be interesting to see sales figures for cheap crap “film fad” sploitation cameras versus an updated Netta-like camera. Maybe an updated Netta-like camera would leave the whole Lomography scene in the dust.

 

[logan2z]

The problem for me with prints, is I'm limited to what I can do with them. Sticking them in a folder after looking once or twice just seems like a waste of time and effort. Scanning for Flickr or a slide show is pretty much what I could do now on a regular basis. It's just what it is.

What do others here do with their prints if you can't mount them and stick them up on a wall? And why do it then?

What do you do with your prints?

 

[Helge]

Why? They seem to be serving their intended market.

A market can be educated and guided.

People will, to a point and for a time (really important the last one) buy something if it is sold well, fitting into some vague notions, aspirations and ideas of identity.

Holgas, Diana’s and all the other Lomo sploitation cams doesn’t sell as well as they used to. People wouldn’t have bought them if they knew a few things first.

A Nettar f4.5 is both a far better, cooler and more authentic camera than either of the aforementioned.
It has been there all along at a lower price.

 

[snusmumriken]

I think humans want to distinguish themselves from others. We all try to be different.

Yes, and later you realise that you were one of thousands trying to be different in exactly the same way.

 

[Alan Edward Klein]

That’s a really good question. For me, I have all these boxes…..

But to answer the “why do it then” query, that’s really easy. I do it because I have to. It’s for the same reason I have hundred of pages in my drawing sketchbooks and stacks of old sketchbooks around. In my approach, it has never been about the finished product but, rather, about being in the process of creating and doing. I suppose this is why I have never been motivated to monetize or even show what I do.

Engaging in the process, or either doing photography or drawing (or when I go out for a long run), puts my in what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi coined as “flow.” My focus is on what I am doing, the mind relaxes, and time disappears. It is not unusual to emerge from the darkroom, surprised that it has transitioned from day to night while I’ve been in there. It’s the same when I draw. Nothing else that goes on the world around me matters and a couple hours slips by.

That I end up with all this flat work as a result is just a measure of how effective the process is. I have the space to store the work and it will eventually become something for my children to deal with.

I get similar pleasure for making slideshows that I could show tp others on my TV or YouTube or on a monitor. It's all creative process and more people actually can see what I do then when I used to make prints that just got stuck in a folder and put up in the closet.


The slide show gets put on Dvd or memory cards and given to family now to enjoy. I doubt if anyone is going to go through my attic and boxes after i'm gone. Plus i get to enjoy their enjoyment now while I'm alive.

Here's an idea. Frame some of your pictures and give them as gifts to friends and family. That way they can enjoy them now and you can enjoy them enjoying it now as well.

 

[snusmumriken]

The problem for me with prints, is I'm limited to what I can do with them. Sticking them in a folder after looking once or twice just seems like a waste of time and effort. Scanning for Flickr or a slide show is pretty much what I could do now on a regular basis. It's just what it is.

What do others here do with their prints if you can't mount them and stick them up on a wall? And why do it then?

For some people, possibly more than you imagine, the final product is the negative or positive image captured on the film.

For said above user group, a flat, linear, gamma corrected 16bit/channel scan of the final photo on the negative/positive is a much more faithful (and/or useful, depending on purpose) representation of the signal on the film than a strongly compressed, strongly non linearised rephotographed version of said negative on silver gelatine paper.

The process you are familiar with, nowadays, ends at different stages for different people, and that is fine.

What I fell in love with all those years ago was prints. I never saw the negatives of the photos I admired, which I saw in exhibitions. My main ambition has always been to make photos good enough that I wanted to hang them on the wall and look at them. If others like them, that's a fun bonus.

We have limited wall space in our home, so I have 3 re-usable frames and change the photos in them about every 3 weeks. I print my best photos to the same size, and dry mount them on the same sized card, so that they all fit the frames and look as good as they can. It is quite fun to choose three connected photos. Right now it's landscapes with tiny distant people in them.

 

[VinceInMT]

I get similar pleasure for making slideshows that I could show tp others on my TV or YouTube or on a monitor.

I understand that. I’ve been scanning all the 35mm slides my dad shot from the mid-1950s to the mid-1990s and putting them online in a shared folder for family members to peruse.

I haven’t viewed anything on a TV since the last TV I bought was a CRT type and it went to the e-cycler years ago. My biggest monitor is on my new 24” Mac but, and this is crazy to say, but most of what I do is on a 17-year old XP machine with a 19” CRT monitor.

 

[Sirius Glass]

I tend to agree about the primacy of prints and I observed a reaction them just this past week. I spent 2 weeks in Italy in May on a study abroad with other university students. While I shot lots of images with my phone that I used in the daily blog I wrote on the trip, I also took along my Minolta SRT-201 and several rolls of Ilford HP5+ which I used, mostly, for shoot-from-the-hip street photography. After returning, developing and scanning the film, I added them to my blog so my fellow travelers could see them. I’ve also posted some of those images in the gallery here.

The professor who led the trip sent out a mass email and invited any and all to a summer critique where we could show work we’ve been doing since school let out in early May. The majority of those who showed up had been on the Italy trip and had seen these black and white images online. I brought 8x10 enlargements of some of these street shots made on Ilford FB paper and mounted on matte board. I didn’t install these but passed them around and noticed how they spent more time looking at each image than they probably did with the digital version. Not only did they hold each one in their own hands, they would hold it away, then bring it in close up, tilt it to change the way light reflected off the emulsion and the surface, and generally embrace it as a physical object. Comments included revenue to the richness of tones in the prints.

The subject matter and compositional elements aside, I am leaning toward believing that it’s the physicality of the print, whether from a digital or film source, that allows it to transcend what the digitally viewed version has to offer.

Hence the comments that I have posted that there is nothing like hold an silver gelatin print in ones hands.

 

[Pieter12]

I think there is more of an interest now than there was five years ago, because my enrollment is increasing each year...or that could just be down to my sparkling personality...

I took a local community college elective photo class this Spring to jump-start a different facet of a project I have been working on. It was film-based and limited enrollment. There were something like 14 students (a mix of generations) at the first meeting, and only 3 completed the final assignment. It was an excellent class and could have been much better if more of the students had followed through. The instructor warned over and over that those who withdrew were wasting an opportunity. The class was not likely to be repeated anytime soon, maybe never because of the high drop/withdrawal numbers. And it was not his lack of charisma, knowledge or teaching skills that were to blame. Many come to film photography from digital, and cannot get over the effort and technical hurdles involved in producing a good black and white darkroom print. Plus the fact that this particular class required some creative, critical thinking and not just some snaps of your friends.

 

[Andrew O'Neill]

It is a fact that many...dare I say most... people are not willing to invest the time and effort required to "master" most things. I recall when I studied lithography (real lithography on stones), when I started the course at uni (mid 80's), there were about 15 of us. By the end there were three. I continued on with it in my third and fourth years ( I was lucky to have studied under two excellent instructors, Nelson Yuen, and Gwen Curry). By the fourth year, I was the last man standing. I do have students bitching and moaning about how hard it is to develop film and make prints in the darkroom.. waaaa waaaa waaaa... and they'd much rather be shooting with their phones, and editing on them. Where's the fun in that??

 

[jtk]

The problem for me with prints, is I'm limited to what I can do with them. Sticking them in a folder after looking once or twice just seems like a waste of time and effort. Scanning for Flickr or a slide show is pretty much what I could do now on a regular basis. It's just what it is.

What do others here do with their prints if you can't mount them and stick them up on a wall? And why do it then?

At 8 I learned how to shoot, process, print film, did that simply as a part of life until I happened to hear about Minor White and studied with one of his direct students at Mendocino Art Center. I was 25 at that time. Now I'm 78 and as a direct result of that last experience I now rarely photograph anything that I don't want to print...which I do with inkjet. That may mean I value my individual prints more highly, yet view them more harshly, than many film photographers seem to do.

My prints are valuable to me (unless I discard them). For a long while I put them in archival boxes. I realized I wasn't being honest with myself and spent a couple of years, on and off, by editing the keepers and placing them all in Itoya archival albums
This means I've looked relatively regularly at all of my prints. Some are hung for six months or a year at home in inexpensive glass frames. Because I live with those individuals and learn their weaknesses, they sometimes get culled. Often I re-print with new eyes.

Looking ahead I find that I need to do my photography in terms of projects...which means I'll have to remove the prints I've hung, almost certainly discarding a few...because I've come to understand their individual shortcomings and am re-thinking how I want to exhibit my prints...perhaps at a receptive gallery.

Most of my prints are on 11X17 paper.

 

[pentaxuser]

I started this whole business when I bought a second-hand Kodak photography book in a sale of books in Llangollen, Wales about 25 years ago. That gave my wife an idea of what to buy me on my next birthday and what arrived was a Pentax camera

Several years later after taking only colour film, I suddenly ( relatively speaking ) had a desire to go back to b&w film which I hadn't used since my early teens and did so and that started a quest to find out more about b&w. I discovered that a nightschool b&w course was available at a local college and joined it. I was so impressed I re-enrolled again to gain more experience

I was hooked and to cut a long story short ended up converting a redundant bedroom into a darkroom about 2004/5

Anyway the real point of this ramble is to say that while I cannot say what the other students did once the course was over I can say that there was literally not one drop-out during either course's duration. Apart from me all the rest were in their late teens or early 20s

So my experience and of course it was only two courses was that the students were really involved and keen as mustard to learn. On each session there was something else to learn and it was clearly a joy and not a burden to come each week It was an adventure

pentaxuser

 

[Pieter12]

I think that the drop-out rate in beginning level darkroom classes is pretty low, because the bar is set pretty low. Once one gets to more creative and independent endeavors, the demands often exceed the students' enthusiasm to proceed (with film, at least). My experience with art schools is it is knives out at critique time. There is a story that used to circulate at Art Center about an instructor who set fire to work he did not think was worthy (probably an urban legend).

 

[snusmumriken]

I don't think we could accuse digital photographers of not being willing to invest time, money and effort. I suspect the real stumbling block with film is the darkroom itself. Youngsters aren't often in a position where they can devote space to a darkroom or convert parts of buildings that don't belong to them, or feel settled enough. Communal/college darkrooms may not be available and can be dispiriting unless there is a tyrant in charge.

Of course it doesn't actually require much kit to make decent prints, and temporary use of the bathroom can be enough facility. But when I did that I was a bachelor, so there were no queues of cross-legged children, and the (only) loo was outdoors. I had to wait most of my life to have my own darkroom shed capable of really good prints, and a dry mounting press that occupies a square metre of the house. If I was starting now, I don't imagine I would find the analogue route terribly tempting.

 

[Agulliver]

A new Nettar.....and how much would it cost? Adjusted for inflation those things cost hundreds of dollarpounds when they were new, and that's when there was an existing film camera/mechanical shutter/lens factory going full tilt.

The simple, plastcicky cameras marketed by Lomography and now Kodak serve a purpose, and provide a cheap way in with a brand new product. The Kodak half frame camera functions, and probably produces pictures as good as an early 70s instamatic....which, when one adjusts for inflation, cost only a little less.

Why make a new Nettar when it will likely cost 10x more than a vintage one? It's one thing to steer newbies towards a vintage Nettar on sale at 30-40 dollarpounds....quite another to say "well, your choice is that plastic Kodak at 50 or the New Nettar at 400".

Because those plastic cameras *are not aimed at us*. I come close to tearing my remaining hair out every time I hear the clamour "We need new film cameras".....company introduces new film camera at reasonable entry price point..."NOOOOO NOT LIKE THAT! I DEMAND A NETTAR AT $4.99"

 

[faberryman]

Why make a new Nettar when it will likely cost 10x more than a vintage one? It's one thing to steer newbies towards a vintage Nettar on sale at 30-40 dollarpounds....quite another to say "well, your choice is that plastic Kodak at 50 or the New Nettar at 400".

Remember when Kodak was bringing back Ektachome for a new Super8 movie camera? It was supposed to cost something like $800 and before you knew it was going to be $3000? And then they sort of silently dropped the idea. Fortunately for some, they did come out with the film. I am not sure Kodak should be in charge of a new Nettar.

 

[VinceInMT]

….Many come to film photography from digital, and cannot get over the effort and technical hurdles involved in producing a good black and white darkroom print.…

That and the lack of immediate gratification that they get with digital.

I have a friend, a former student and now an architect, who made such a comment about why he’d never do film: it takes too long to see what you’ve got. On the other hand, several of my 20-something fellow art students have fallen in love with the darkroom at our university. Anecdotally I have noticed that they also work with other media that is time consuming.

 

[Helge]

A new Nettar.....and how much would it cost? Adjusted for inflation those things cost hundreds of dollarpounds when they were new, and that's when there was an existing film camera/mechanical shutter/lens factory going full tilt.

The simple, plastcicky cameras marketed by Lomography and now Kodak serve a purpose, and provide a cheap way in with a brand new product. The Kodak half frame camera functions, and probably produces pictures as good as an early 70s instamatic....which, when one adjusts for inflation, cost only a little less.

Why make a new Nettar when it will likely cost 10x more than a vintage one? It's one thing to steer newbies towards a vintage Nettar on sale at 30-40 dollarpounds....quite another to say "well, your choice is that plastic Kodak at 50 or the New Nettar at 400".

Because those plastic cameras *are not aimed at us*. I come close to tearing my remaining hair out every time I hear the clamour "We need new film cameras".....company introduces new film camera at reasonable entry price point..."NOOOOO NOT LIKE THAT! I DEMAND A NETTAR AT $4.99"

Thing is there is actually not that much separating these plastic toys from a real camera. A few more lens elements. A better shutter and better more thought through design.
Double, triple or even quadruple the price of a Chinese plastic thing, would not be unrealistic either to produce or to expect people wanting to pay.

Quite a few things happened to mass manufacture in the sixties to now that would make such a camera if not trivial, then quite easy to make compared to what is spewed out on Wish for a few dollars.

 

[Pieter12]

That and the lack of immediate gratification that they get with digital.

I have a friend, a former student and now an architect, who made such a comment about why he’d never do film: it takes too long to see what you’ve got. On the other hand, several of my 20-something fellow art students have fallen in love with the darkroom at our university. Anecdotally I have noticed that they also work with other media that is time consuming.

Isn't it interesting that many today expect photography to be instantaneous. As you say, other media takes time to even start to be finalized. Ceramics, painting, sculpture. Painters can take months if not years to finish a painting. although there are some who will churn out a quantity of small paintings in a single day. Watercolors are pretty spontaneous, but take a lot of skill. There's no undo or painting over with them.

 

[faberryman]

Isn't it interesting that many today expect photography to be instantaneous.

Photography can be instantaneous if you want it to be. Photography is flexible. You can do a lot of things a lot of different ways, some fast, some slow, some in-between. You just need to chose the appropriate tool for what you want to accomplish.

 

[VinceInMT]

Isn't it interesting that many today expect photography to be instantaneous. As you say, other media takes time to even start to be finalized. Ceramics, painting, sculpture. Painters can take months if not years to finish a painting. although there are some who will churn out a quantity of small paintings in a single day. Watercolors are pretty spontaneous, but take a lot of skill. There's no undo or painting over with them.

Of course, the desire for instantaneous is what Polaroid built its brand on. On the other hand, the Mona LIsa was worked on for decades.

 

[markjwyatt]

As for plasticky cameras- here is the way to do it:

1. Sell the lens/shutter/aperture assembly (may cost $200-$1000+) depending on what is in it. Glass elements. Tessar or at least triplet quality or better. Could have x_sync.
2. Supply the film in plastic camera bodies designed to mate to the lens assembly, optimally keep the film flat, and advance the film, plus have optional inexpensive lightmeter, flash, etc.
2A. Premium camera bodies mating to the lens assemblies and taking 35mm or other film could be offered as the photographer advances.


Sort of like the 126 or 110 concept, except extend it to the full film handling camera functionality.

 

[Brendan Quirk]

You forgot to add 'in my opinion'. Again, and for your information, the 'final product' is whatever people want it to be.

For some people, possibly more than you imagine, the final product is the negative or positive image captured on the film.

For said above user group, a flat, linear, gamma corrected 16bit/channel scan of the final photo on the negative/positive is a much more faithful (and/or useful, depending on purpose) representation of the signal on the film than a strongly compressed, strongly non linearised rephotographed version of said negative on silver gelatine paper.

The process you are familiar with, nowadays, ends at different stages for different people, and that is fine.

Yes, I should have said MY final product. So easy to make mistakes.

For me, absolute faithfulness is not necessary. However, I do value as much faithfulness as is possible given the final intention.

 

[Cholentpot]

We've blown way off subject.

There's a strong interest in film photography because in stores and online color film won't stay in stock. There have been multiple price hikes and people don't seem to care. Kodak has reintroduced a few stocks and quite often some third party is putting out a repackaged film. Prices of used cameras has doubled and sometimes quadrupled. No-one laughs at me using film much anymore and they see it as a mark of respect and professionalism. I have a handful of friends that 'consult' with me about cameras before they post them on eBay or whatnot to sell and make money.

Currently film photography is having a moment. It's nice to be on the forefront. It's also nice to have all these cameras that no-one cared about 10 years ago that I can't afford now if I wanted to buy.

 

[Brendan Quirk]

That and the lack of immediate gratification that they get with digital.

I have a friend, a former student and now an architect, who made such a comment about why he’d never do film: it takes too long to see what you’ve got. On the other hand, several of my 20-something fellow art students have fallen in love with the darkroom at our university. Anecdotally I have noticed that they also work with other media that is time consuming.

I am not disagreeing. I would like to share something. I just returned from my favo(u)rite photo place, and I KNOW I got many good shots. The conditions were perfect for what I like. Midday in late June, clear sky, beautiful woods with copious vertical shafts of light spotting things up like a stage. Of course I want to see the pics - but I KNOW they are good! There is some great savo(u)r in anticipating the results, and I wouldn't hurry it up for anything!