Anybody else still using film cameras?

[danphoto]

I suspect most people take photos, copy them on to their PC hard disk or Flickr or whatever and never have them printed. Most probably never back up their PC hard disk. When the PC packs up, those photos will be gone forever.

And I for one would love to have a crisp tenner for every time some fool guest at a wedding with a point and shoot or worse still their phone has got in my shot and screwed up what the couple were paying a shedful of money for, just so they can grab a crap out-of-focus badly-exposed snap of part of a the bride or whatever, which nobody will ever see ...

I find it interesting that the man who showed me how to develop my own photos is a professional wedding photographer who made the switch to digital and says given a choice, he would go back to film. The reason is nothing to do with image quality or anything like that; he is sick of spending time on Photoshop on request from the fat bride who will insist he does that to make her look thinner in her wedding portrait! Or to remove a spot from her chin, or some other vain nonsense. With film, he could turn around and say "tough shoot but that's what you look like!" Personally, I think editing photos like this is stupid.

I think it is too, but yer man has made a rod for his own back. He should tell them to bugger off, like we always did, or else pay £100 + VAT an hour for the offending snaps to be farmed out to a professional digital retoucher. Actually, the problem did exist with film (the requests for "airbrushing", that is) though not to anything like the same extent it now does. That's because just like any fool with a camera can nowadays be a wedding photographer, everybody knows that retouching zits and reducing a fat bride down five dress sizes is something which any acneous youth with a computer can do in five minutes ...

 

[CharlieB]

Here's a link to some of my shots from last years London to Brighton veteran car rally, taken on a 1903 Kodak box camera, same kind of age as the cars!
http://www.flickr.co...57622661635047/

Top photos, MQ.
And the quality and sharpness is comparable to anything taken on a reasonable digital today. What film would something like that use? 120?

 

[mightyquin]

Unless of course they're professionals. If you replaced "anyone who is" with "many amateurs who are", I'd agree with you.

And just for the record, I'm a long-time amateur turned professional who's retired so is once again an amateur - which reminds me of that awesome quote attributed to Edward Weston ...

Photography to the amateur is recreation. To the professional it is work, and hard work too, no matter how pleasurable it my be.

Actually I know a number of professional photographers who shoot film for their work. A couple are wedding photographers, but mostly they are 'fine art' photographers - certainly digital is the standard for stock, most wedding/PR work and commercial. I get the odd wedding/function and will use digital for them unless the client specifically requests film.

 

[mightyquin]

Top photos, MQ.
And the quality and sharpness is comparable to anything taken on a reasonable digital today. What film would something like that use? 120?

Hi, thanks for the compliment! Yes they are 120 film cameras, Kodak Brownie Model No2 (earliest version) - I've got two of them, both found on ebay for a few quid each.

 

[danphoto]

What film would something like that use? 120?

Or 620 (same film, different spool so not interchangeable), giving a print 6 x 9 cm at first, then in later years 6 x 6 and 6 x 4.5 variants.

Note that many old box cameras took the larger 116 film, the point of which was that a contact print was postcard size. There was also 616 film, which was, again, same film different spool.

 

[tyred]

Definitely great photos MQ.

It is something that slightly annoys me in that the darkroom enlarger I have can't handle the larger medium format negative as I've recently got an old MF camera and would love to try it on b&w.

 

[goo_mason]

I was getting really into photography about 6 or 7 years ago, and joined the local camera club (which at that time had one member - me - and the guy who ran it). It just ended up with him showing me how to develop & print my own B&W shots in the darkroom and that was it. It was fabulous, especially when I got hold of a bag full of my late, great-uncle's negatives and began printing old family shots & local places, none of which exist any more! No-one had seen any of these pics since the 1950s, and they allowed me to see people who I'd only ever heard stories about,

Sadly, I gradually stopped going some years ago & then stopped altogether. Bought a digital SLR two years ago which really doesn't get much use.

Maybe I should pull out my OM-4, ETRSi, mju2 and EOS300, load them alll up with mono film and get back into this again. Quite like the idea of DIY home-processing on the very cheap and then scanning the negs, though printing on photo paper in the darkroom has such a magical quality that I may have to go back & see if the club's still going.

 

[Coco]

Maybe I should pull out my OM-4

Got any OM lenses you don't need anymore

 

[skudupnorth]

I used to work in the early mini-labs during the late 80's when everything started to speed up including "1 hour photo's", In reality the machines were prone to breaking and often customers films were chomped by the film processor !
I still have my old darkroom stuff in the attic because like so many on here i used to develop and print B&W films,not sure if i would drag it all out again though.
When i say the art of photography,i mean the planning of shots,the basic set-up of the camera ect,ect.Nowadays anyone can just grab a digi camera,point at what they want and hey presto a pretty near perfect photo ! Even my kids can take a good shot !!!!
One thing i do like about the old kit is the weight,new camera's feel very fragile

 

[danphoto]

One thing i do like about the old kit is the weight,new camera's feel very fragile

Then you've obviously not spent most of your Saturdays running round London for 8-12 hours with two bulletproof Canon 1dMkIII's with f1.4 lenses on your shoulders and three more L-series lenses plus a flashgun round your waist

 

[Andy in Sig]

I used to work in the early mini-labs during the late 80's when everything started to speed up including "1 hour photo's", In reality the machines were prone to breaking and often customers films were chomped by the film processor !
I still have my old darkroom stuff in the attic because like so many on here i used to develop and print B&W films,not sure if i would drag it all out again though.
When i say the art of photography,i mean the planning of shots,the basic set-up of the camera ect,ect.Nowadays anyone can just grab a digi camera,point at what they want and hey presto a pretty near perfect photo ! Even my kids can take a good shot !!!!
One thing i do like about the old kit is the weight,new camera's feel very fragile

One shouldn't get too carried away about this but I would suggest that the transition from happy snapping to photography is when you really start thinking about composition (the best way to understand this is to read a general photography book or if you want to do something like landscapes then e.g. a book from Charlie Waite). The second thing is the realisation that you are often not best served by the camera fully automatically choosing the exposure for you. I've moved from a Contax G2 (utterly brilliant lenses but auto-everything camera) to a Zeiss ZI and it is liberating.

If you really, really want to do total photography then go large format: it makes manual 35 mm photography look like mass production.

For me (and this is very subjective), the curse of digital is that the instant review of the picture encourages a sort of stab in the dark sort of mentality as opposed to craftsmanship. I would hate to have started in the digital age.

 

[tyred]

.

For me (and this is very subjective), the curse of digital is that the instant review of the picture encourages a sort of stab in the dark sort of mentality as opposed to craftsmanship. I would hate to have started in the digital age.

Ther eis definitely something in that as well. I remember being at a local historic landmark to take a few photos of it (on 35mm manual SLR). I was carefully looking at it from every possible angle, weighing up the different view points, looking at it through different lens, trying to only take a few exposures so as to not waste film. By chance, I met a friend who is a keen advocate of digital photography and she was just snapping countless exposures with the view that there is bound to be one good shot out of all the ones she'd taken, and even if there wasn't she could touch it up in Photoshop.


A personal thing perhaps, but I don't agree with that point of view. Try and get it right in the first place and keep practicing until you do! (and I do realise that unless you use slide film, you can compensate for poor exposure to a certain extent in the darkroom.)

 

[Coco]

Perhaps it was because I started with film, but I do try to take the photo I want rather than multiple guesses. To me digital is just another type of post capture processing, but one that I can do easily and quickly. The real art is in taking the picture, and it doesn't matter what medium the image ends up on.

Interesting thoughts about people who have started in digital photography though.

 

[Coco]

If you really, really want to do total photography then go large format: it makes manual 35 mm photography look like mass production.

I did investigate strapping a scanner onto the back of a large format camera - you can get some quite interesting shots

 

[skudupnorth]

I would love a go at large format but the cost is out of my budget.I knew a photogher who had wonderful large format camera's which he used for landscapes,fantastic quaility !