Time Magazine bullish on film photography

[Larry the sailor]

When I go home after a long session printing, my wife (who adores me by the way) says that I stink, the next words out of my lips is Honey thats the smell of money in our world.

I am actually going back to the jumpsuit apparel soon to combat destroying all my clothes.

You could always go the Walter White/Breaking Bad approach

 

[GarageBoy]

I don't know about this. I live in NYC. Since life is busy I get my film developed at ColorHouse in NYC and they do extremely professional work extremely quickly.

When I first moved to NYC over two years ago, the lab seemed to be doing a pretty decent business. When I went back to drop of a handful of rolls after a vacation recently, the line was out the door and the person in front of me dropped off over 50 rolls for development. I asked the staff and they said times have been extremely good as of late. This may be purely anecdotal, but at least in NYC I have seen a very large and noticeable uptick in film usage recently.

Cause all the other labs are either terrible or reducing what they do (I miss lti lightside processing e6)
NYC is also kind of an outlier - film is cool in many scenes here

 

[NJH]

I am not convinced about the long term viability of this Jose Villa inspired trend for colour C-41 hybrid workflow, as soon as those guys find the latest gen digital cameras and some software plugin can create a similar look it will go the same way as everything else (or if one was being mega cynical learn more about colour grading and achieving nice fill light effects either in post or doing it the old/proper way).

 

[FoidPoosening]

Cause all the other labs are either terrible or reducing what they do (I miss lti lightside processing e6)
NYC is also kind of an outlier - film is cool in many scenes here

I can definitely see what you're saying with NYC being an anomaly. Can anyone else voice what it's like in other cities or small towns?

I am not convinced about the long term viability of this Jose Villa inspired trend for colour C-41 hybrid workflow, as soon as those guys find the latest gen digital cameras and some software plugin can create a similar look it will go the same way as everything else (or if one was being mega cynical learn more about colour grading and achieving nice fill light effects either in post or doing it the old/proper way).

Modes for that already exist in the Fujifilm X100T and X100F, and I don't think it's made a significant difference in the volume of film used either way. At least for me, having to fiddle with different modes for a "mock look" is not enticing.

 

[Down Under]

Film use may be on the increase in North America and Europe where the numbers of traditional photographers make film a viable retail market. In Australia there are film users in the major cities but in Tasmania,where I live, it seems we are a fast declining breed.

I haven't bought film in Hobart for some time but until a couple of years ago one retail shop offered a very limited selection at (need I say) very high prices. I doubt anyone is offering film in Launceston, our second largest urban center, and as for the country towns, forget it. Most shooters buy OL from sellers or from Vanbar Photographics in Melbourne.

An interesting thread, this. Some may be interested in my experiences in going into the retail D&P trade and selling film.

Australia has, it seems, a growing (in a way) number of small labs offering 'one-off' B&W and C41 processing, which is to say for the 'dabbler' market - that is, shooters who bang off one or two rolls now and then and are looking for fast processing and, sometimes, scanning. The problem is these labs want up to A$35 to process one roll and most amateurs refuse to pay this price.

After I retired in 2012 I offered a local D&P service for about a year. This was a small scale 'at home' operation promoted only locally but I found my workload averaged 2-3 rolls every week, the best I ever did was a 10 roll order but the shooter initially wanted a 50% bulk discount (I didn't play) and we eventually settled on 10% cash in advance. I never scanned -life is too short and I have too many interesting things to do to spend my declining years hunched over a Plustek trying to micro adjust the scanner settings for someone's crappy snaps. Most amateurs I know have Epson prosumer scanners and are using free post processing software (Faststone is the most popular and seems to do almost everything they want) anyway, so they are okay to do their own after developing work.

Almost everyone I dealt with seemed to think $5.00 per roll was a fair price, well, maybe in 1980... They also wanted to talk about what they shot and how they 'visualised' their images. Some would have yapped on for an hour or more.

Some of my clients were very annoying with their unreasonable demands and refusal to pay what I considered to be my reasonable prices. After two months I changed to two times a week processing (= 3-4 days service) with full payment in advance and NO discounts, which suited almost everyone.The time wasters vanished and my darkroom life greatly improved.

Over the year I found demand was shifting from B&W to C41 with a growing demand for expired 35mm E6 processed in C41 which was always risky but fun to see what results (often very unexpected) came out of my processing tanks. Amazing colors, scanning some of this must be a nightmare but the final prints were always, to say the least, "interesting".

Over the year I also noted a steady shift in my clientele, from initially older shooters with expensive equipment to students and young people using SLRs and other cameras they acquired either from family or charity shops.



No pros I knew (note the past tense) in Tasmania used film. All were into digital. I say "past tense" as they have all closed up now. A few still shoot weddings, but operate out of their homes and have web sites. Even this market has declined since 2012 given the large number of amateurs who buy new digital gear and suddenly metamorphose "professionals", the results they offer are almost exclusively crap but the market gets what they pay for. Most buyers haven't a clue as to what good wedding photography is anyway. Sad but this is life in photography in 2017.

I tried selling film for a few months but I found I couldn't offer the discounted prices shooters got from OL sources. Most of the films I sold were 120 B&W rolls and bulk loaded 35mm B&W but in the latter case I found I made more by selling plastic film cassettes than from the actual film. Not bad planning on my part, rather the high cost of film in Australia, even bought in bulk.

In the end I couldn't make any reasonable profit in relation to time management, and I decided to gear down the business and finally dropped out. I decided I preferred travel to hanging out in a dark room and I closed down the service to go overseas. With no regrets.

I no longer process for others but I still do my own B&W and C41 - not E6 as I find digital (Nikon) suits my requirements better than slide film without the hassle of processing. Six years ago I was one of about 30 photographers I knew who had darkrooms, but today I seem to be the only survivor of the breed.

We will be relocating to Victoria (state) next year and I definitely plan to continue my home processing, at least until the few hundred rolls of frozen film I have are used up. After this, who knows? I may even sell the Rolleis.

Every photographer I know seems to be going down the same path. As time passes and everything changes and we get older, one by one we are disposing of our film cameras and going digital. Young people still shoot film (I don't know why, maybe for the nostalgia?) but a high number of these are what Bob Carnie calls 'dabblers' (I agree with the term) and only shoot one or two rolls now and then. When they put away their cameras, that will be it.

For all these changes, the Time article was spot on, film seems to be on a strong survival curve. This pleases me, as I like the look of 'analog'.
.

 

[CMoore]

This is simply my Personal Opinion and Preference...........
If i am Reading/Hearing things correctly, it seems there is a pretty big percentage of "Film Shooters" that .....do not have a darkroom.?
I see this scenario A Lot. They all have some reason why they... "prefer film over digital".....but they have their Negatives scanned, and then whatever they select from that gets sent to a...Inkjet printer i guess.?
I am only a Beginner Photographer. I shoot film because i am interested in learning the traditional darkroom skills. I enjoy it as a hobby and it gives me a bit of Intellectual and Artistic release that i do not get from my day to day life. I do not shoot film because i think it is "Better" than digital.....it is simply a hobby i enjoy.
But if i could not have a darkroom, i think i would just give up on film...the two fit like a hand and glove.

 

[trendland]

The article from two years ago demonstrates really poor, lazy research by a writer who obviously doesn't have a clue what's going on in the world of film photography. In contrast, the more recent article is a significant improvement, even including quotes from people in the industry. I don't fully agree that it is professionals who are fueling the industry, but rather that it is the hobbyists who are having the greater impact. But overall this year's article is not too bad.

Yes thats indeed often seen from time magazine.
These guys are really poor, lazy and bad informed - as you mentioned.
Washington post will often not trust to write what time magazine research give into pencils.
But seriously these guys are technical idiots.
How often CNN showed a photo of a crashed F-18 ?
WITH PICTURES OF F - 14, F -15
But real Fake News we will have from a F - 16 Picture than.



So as here in such sort of jounalism

with regards