Is there really a strong interest in film photography?

[Highlyanimated]

Whilst on eBay, I put in "Nikon camera" in the "cameras and photography" category and came up w/ over 120,000 hits. When I changed the category to "film photography", I got 10,000. Hmmmm.

Many years in market research tells me that this means something.

I am a relatively newcomer to film, 2yrs now. Started with a Nikon FM and now have several cameras like a Rolleiflex and Bronica RF I shoot regularly. There's definitely something happening in the industry. I'm here to stay.

 

[DREW WILEY]

Ha! What momus observed means that only 8% as many people are willing to give up their Nikon films camera as want to get rid of their neo-Nikon gear. I ain't sellin' mine either, a classic FM2n. (More realistically, that figure is an artifact of how the auction site tends to classify things, including lenses and accessories in the larger category). A far better indicator of interest can be obtained by simply viewing the Kodak film manufacturing flicks currently on this site. They certainly think there's still a lot of interest. A single titanium coating component featured in that flick probably cost more than most of our own houses to make. They coat enough film base in a single run at a time to produce over 300,000 35mm cassettes, but then get yelled and cussed at when all of that prematurely sells out, and people on sites like this therefore surmise film use is dying !! And that's just one type of color film, in just its smallest format.

 

[Agulliver]

Another anecdote. I've just returned from a week camping in Dorset. In a charity shop in Weymouth I was able to buy a very nicely preserved (if obviously used) Paterson tank and forced film washer. The date on the cardboard box containing the tank is 1968. There was also a Leitz slide projector on offer, which I left though it was in excellent condition and likewise complete with box and instructions. A quick chat with the staff confirmed that someone cleared out a photographic darkroom a couple of months ago and there had been lots more gear including an enlarger, trays, another more modern tank....and they'd all been snapped up.

Something is happening. 10 years ago that stuff would have ended up in a skip.

 

[jtk]

fwiw I think a bottom level of some sort will arrive (has arrived?) and that will come from a few online services.

My own film use almost totally stopped (save for a half dozen rolls of 35 TriX for some unknown pending project) when I could no longer count on good local processing of E6.

I keep a Nikon V scanner mostly for old-times sake and I can't invest the necessary time to discard my remaining processed film and slides....digital saved my "best" film work and I'm too old to wade through the stuff that didn't make it through a several year scanning marathon.

 

[hiketripenjoy]

tonnes of accessories for Nikon camera that could have brought that figure up.. a lot more digicams in production too?

 

[CMoore]

I do not know if there is a "strong interest"..............but Ilford has managed to stay in business for the last 20 years.
They pretty much just bake B&W film and paper, don't they.?

 

[Helge]

fwiw I think a bottom level of some sort will arrive (has arrived?) and that will come from a few online services.

My own film use almost totally stopped (save for a half dozen rolls of 35 TriX for some unknown pending project) when I could no longer count on good local processing of E6.

I keep a Nikon V scanner mostly for old-times sake and I can't invest the necessary time to discard my remaining processed film and slides....digital saved my "best" film work and I'm too old to wade through the stuff that didn't make it through a several year scanning marathon.

You do a great deal of posting considering.

 

[Pieter12]

I do not know if there is a "strong interest"..............but Ilford has managed to stay in business for the last 20 years.
They pretty much just bake B&W film and paper, don't they.?

A bit longer than that. "1879 founded by Alfred Harman making Dry Plates"

 

[MattKing]

A bit longer than that. "1879 founded by Alfred Harman making Dry Plates"

Well...
There was a receivership in between - about 20 years ago. That original Ilford was effectively gone as of then.
And the entity (Harman Technology Ltd.) that has been operating the new business - the one that has had quite a bit of success, along with real challenges during that time, they are the ones who deserve credit for that.
It is really their role that matters now.

 

[CMoore]

A bit longer than that. "1879 founded by Alfred Harman making Dry Plates"

There IS an art when communicating, via text, hundreds or thousands of kilometers apart..................
When i said 20 years, i meant since the onset of digital caused a big decline in film sales.

 

[Agulliver]

We know for a fact that the remaining film manufacturers are seeing a significant increase in demand. The global market for photo film has expanded since 2016, and the companies still producing it (especially C41 colour) are having difficulty keeping up. Harman and Foma have seen smaller increases in the B&W market but definitely tangible and sustained. This market also now supports the smaller players such as Bergger, Adox while Kodak and Fuji keep a hand in B&W too.

Things may vary by geographic location but I still say that colleges restarting film photography courses, reopening dark rooms and the continued existence of dark room equipment on the market suggest it reached rock bottom some time ago and has begun to grow again.

Whether this means " a strong interest" or a "resurgence" remains to be seen.

 

[Sirius Glass]

We know for a fact that the remaining film manufacturers are seeing a significant increase in demand. The global market for photo film has expanded since 2016, and the companies still producing it (especially C41 colour) are having difficulty keeping up. Harman and Foma have seen smaller increases in the B&W market but definitely tangible and sustained. This market also now supports the smaller players such as Bergger, Adox while Kodak and Fuji keep a hand in B&W too.

Things may vary by geographic location but I still say that colleges restarting film photography courses, reopening dark rooms and the continued existence of dark room equipment on the market suggest it reached rock bottom some time ago and has begun to grow again.

Whether this means " a strong interest" or a "resurgence" remains to be seen.

Back in 2005 the APUG conversation talked about whether or not film would be available in 2020.

 

[Agulliver]

Back in 2005 the APUG conversation talked about whether or not film would be available in 2020.

That does not surprise me....the downturn in film use around that time was disastrous and very fast. Anyone who remembered how quickly cine film and cameras went from being mainstream to completely obsolete can attest these things can be brutal. While the market bottomed out and took with it Agfa, Konica and Ferrania....and we lost lots of Kodak and Fuji films....we must also be grateful for the companies who clung on and continued. The fact that in 2020 we still have the full range of Ilford films, Foma and a decent selection from Kodak while the smaller players fill interesting gaps and look stable in the future.....is all good and positive.

I can well see that in 2005 the sky was falling in. Things aren't great, but they could be a whole lot worse. There has been some recovery in interest in and sale of film.

 

[Pieter12]

Professional use of film dropped enormously the 2000s, and they were the biggest market by far. That market is not coming back.

 

[Sirius Glass]

Back in 2005 the APUG conversation talked about whether or not film would be available in 2020.

That does not surprise me....the downturn in film use around that time was disastrous and very fast. Anyone who remembered how quickly cine film and cameras went from being mainstream to completely obsolete can attest these things can be brutal. While the market bottomed out and took with it Agfa, Konica and Ferrania....and we lost lots of Kodak and Fuji films....we must also be grateful for the companies who clung on and continued. The fact that in 2020 we still have the full range of Ilford films, Foma and a decent selection from Kodak while the smaller players fill interesting gaps and look stable in the future.....is all good and positive.

I can well see that in 2005 the sky was falling in. Things aren't great, but they could be a whole lot worse. There has been some recovery in interest in and sale of film.

Professional use of film dropped enormously the 2000s, and they were the biggest market by far. That market is not coming back.

I saw it as an opportunity to buy up cameras that I could never afford, Speed Graphic, Graflex and Hasselblad. I also bought up all the lenses I thought that I could use. The camera and lens prices were rock bottom. I laughed all the way to the bank. I started buying up film as it was discontinued. Worst case I figured I could get digital backs for my medium and large format cameras and that the 35mm camera lenses would move to their digital counterparts, but that never happened for me.

 

[DREW WILEY]

Some thought the art of painting was doomed once photography was invented, and especially if color photography ever became feasible. But here we are, with art stores everywhere still selling canvas and pigment. It ain't all about what's "commercial". As long as niche manufacturers are proportionate to the niche users, that's all that counts. Yes, the ingredients require a certain critical mass of volume to stay alive; but we don't necessary need mega-corporations with tentacles going everywhere, like the Kodak of old.

 

[Pieter12]

I laughed all the way to the bank

Shouldn't that be "from the bank?"

 

[slackercrurster]

I am interested using film and I do not care who on eBay is interested.

That sums it up. Do what you like.

But I am flabbergasted there are even 10,000 hits on film cameras!

 

[foc]

Professional use of film dropped enormously the 2000s, and they were the biggest market by far. That market is not coming back.

When you say professional use, are you including cinema/movie film?
Professional still film, to my knowledge, never reached the volume of amateur film sales.

 

[DREW WILEY]

Well, if you go back far enough, when sheet film cameras were the predominant professional standard, you have to keep in mind that a single sheet of film amounted to nearly as much surface area of film, or even considerably more, than an entire roll of 35mm film. And they could shoot a lot of it even on a single assignment.

Sligo? ... sounds like such a beautiful area. I'm trying to remember the name of the large format photographer who used to do workshops there. Parts of our coast in Marin and Sonoma counties look similar; but Ireland would be such a wonderful place to visit.

 

[Pieter12]

When you say professional use, are you including cinema/movie film?
Professional still film, to my knowledge, never reached the volume of amateur film sales.

I am talking about still film. I don’t know the numbers but my experience with pros is they could shoot more film in a day than most amateurs would in a year.

 

[DREW WILEY]

Depends on what you mean by a pro. When I was doing architectural photography, I took far fewer shots in a year than the typical amateur would shoot in a day. The whole point was to get it right the first time. Most of the work was up front evaluating the shoot, balancing the lighting, careful positioning and metering, and so forth - no time left over to waste on redundant shots. That's not the case when people are guessing or bracketing and so forth. Now with digital cameras, the number of "hope I got it" shots seems to have increased tenfold, pretty much the antithesis of professionalism.

Pretty much the same story with studio portrait pros, or even skilled environmental portraitists. Not everyone drinks 39 cups of coffee before a shoot to hype a machine-gunning mentality. But don't get me wrong; we need more machine-gunners to keep up the volume of film sales.

What about a wildlife pro? - yeah, they might rapidly shoot an opportune sequence when it arrives, but might have to wait for weeks in a blind for that to happen. And then that opportunity might last less than half a minute.

 

[nosmok]

Professional use of film dropped enormously the 2000s, and they were the biggest market by far. That market is not coming back.

True that. Here in the USA in the film world, the big blow came with the Hollywood writer's strike around 2008. Prior to then, most scripted television (whether cable or broadcast) and feature films were still shot on negative film. The strike brought in a lot of reality shows that were digital video, and that just stayed the norm in TV after the writers came back to work. It was sheer inertia that had kept Hollywood shooting thousands of feet of negative for as long as it did.

 

[Agulliver]

US TV shows were also shot on film in part because in the old SD days, NTSC video looked *horrible* in PAL and SECAM territories. I remember back in the 80s a handful of episodes of Dallas were unavailable as film transfers to PAL for some reason and they were broadcast in the UK from standards converted NTSC tapes....and the ordinary viewers noticed enough to complain. By 2008 that workflow was less necessary with shows being shot on HD digital video and looking pretty much the same wherever they were broadcast....but perhaps it took at writer's strike to drive it home to the purse holders.

Kodachrome took a hit when National Geographic stopped using it....wasn't it something like 300,000 rolls per year they were responsible for? Had a K14 machine dedicated to processing just National Geographic films?

There is no doubt that the market crashed between 2000 and 2010. Like @Sirius Glass I took the opportunity to buy lenses and other gear I could not otherwise afford. the curious thing is that prices are now up again and I could not afford them if I didn't already own them.

 

[foc]

Parts of our coast in Marin and Sonoma counties look similar; but Ireland would be such a wonderful place to visit.

You are more than welcome to come and visit @DREW WILEY

I remember back in the 1990s, I had a minilab, studio, and photoshop, and I shot professionally covering wedding and studio family portraits. There were 2 other studios locally for weddings and portraits and 3 other minilabs/photoshops. This is all in a small town in the west of Ireland, (in the sticks on the periphery of Europe). Our catchment area was not just the town but the surrounding countryside with an approx population of 70,000 at the time. In the summertime, these numbers increased with visitors.

IIRC our minilab processed around 25,000 orders and I shot around 1,300 rolls of Reala per year. If the other labs and studios had 3/4 of that volume then that would be a total of 82,000 amateur rolls of film and 3300 pro films.

Of course, these figures are for one small area but I remember it wasn't far off when I compared it nationally with Fuji Ireland's estimate of the Irish film market sales both amateur and professional.

Then again, globally it could be a different matter.