Film photography

Film photography is photography with a chemical sensor you use once. Light hits a strip of coated plastic, changes it invisibly, and a wet process makes that change permanent and visible. Everything else — the cameras, the developing, the scanning — is machinery around that one fact.

The practical consequence is scarcity. You have twenty-four or thirty-six frames, you cannot see what you got, and each one has a real cost. People who come from digital describe the same experience: they shoot a tenth as much and think about ten times as long, and a substantial number of them find they prefer the pictures. That is the honest case for film, and it is a case about behaviour rather than about image quality.

The hobby divides into three parts that can be taken up separately. Shooting needs only a camera and a lab. Developing brings the process home and is where the cost per frame collapses. Printing is a darkroom and an enlarger, and it is a distinct craft that many film photographers never take up. Most people do the first, a good number do the second, and the third is a minority — which is worth knowing before you buy an enlarger you found in a skip.

Cost per frame, via a lab

About £0.50–£1

Cost per frame, developing at home

Roughly a third of that

What actually changes

How much you shoot

The real bottleneck

Scanning

1. 1

   Step 1: Shoot one roll on a borrowed or cheap tested camera, and lab-develop it

   Before buying anything, find out whether you actually enjoy shooting without a screen. One roll, one lab, about £25 all in, and it answers the only question that matters.

   You will know it worked when: You have seen your own photographs come back from a lab.

2. 2

   Step 2: Buy one tested body and one 50mm lens

   Tested. From a dealer or a person who has run film through it. Light seals, shutter speeds and meter are the three things to ask about explicitly.

   You will know it worked when: You own a camera you can trust, which is the point.

3. 3

   Step 3: Shoot five rolls of the same film

   One stock, one camera, one focal length. Consistency is what makes results readable — with five variables changing, a bad frame teaches you nothing.

   You will know it worked when: You can predict roughly what a scene will look like.

4. 4

   Step 4: Practise loading a reel in daylight, with a ruined roll

   This is the step that goes wrong, and it goes wrong in the dark where you cannot see why. Sacrifice one roll, load it and unload it a dozen times in daylight, then do it with your eyes shut. Then do it for real in the changing bag.

   You will know it worked when: Your hands can load a reel without your eyes.

5. 5

   Step 5: Develop a roll of black and white at home

   Room-temperature chemistry, a timer, and gentle inversions. It is a twenty-minute wet process at a sink and it is much less demanding than it sounds — the tolerances for black and white are wide.

   You will know it worked when: You have hung up negatives you made yourself.

6. 6

   Step 6: Sort out disposal before you start, not after

   Find whether your local Household Waste and Recycling Centre has a chemical cupboard, and keep separate labelled bottles for used developer and used fixer. Doing this first takes ten minutes and removes the question entirely.

   You will know it worked when: You know where the used chemistry is going.

7. 7

   Step 7: Scan, and accept that this is the tedious part

   Whatever method you chose, this is where the hours go. Batch it, do a roll at a time, and resist scanning every frame at maximum resolution — a contact-sheet pass first and full scans only of the keepers is what makes it sustainable.

   You will know it worked when: Your photographs exist as files.

• A working camera, tested before money changes hands — The single biggest risk in buying film gear is a camera that looks perfect and has a dead meter, sticky shutter blades or perished light seals. Buy from someone who has run a roll through it, or from a dealer who guarantees it. A £120 tested body is better value than a £40 untested one every time, and this is the mistake that puts most people off in their first month.
• One normal lens — A 50mm on 35mm film, which came bundled with millions of cameras and is therefore both excellent and nearly free. Zooms from the era are mostly worse than the cheapest prime and the constraint of a single focal length is a good teacher.
• Black and white film, several rolls of one stock — Sticking to one film until you know how it behaves teaches more than trying eight. Black and white is also the stock you can develop at home most easily, at room temperature, with the widest margin for error.
• A developing tank, reels and a thermometer — The whole home-developing kit and about £50–£90. The tank is light-tight once loaded, so the only step needing total darkness is getting the film onto the reel — which happens inside a changing bag, not a darkroom.
• A changing bag — The thing that means you do not need a darkroom. A light-tight fabric bag with sleeves, £20–£40, and it is what turns developing from a room-sized project into a sink-sized one.
• Chemistry, in the smallest bottles that fit your rate — Developer, fixer, and optionally a stop bath. Concentrates keep for months unopened and decidedly less once opened, so buying big to save money is a false economy for anyone shooting a roll a month.
• A scanning answer, decided before you develop anything — This is the step people forget and it is the one that stalls them. A flatbed with a transparency unit, a dedicated film scanner, a lab scanning service, or photographing negatives on a light source with a digital camera and a macro lens. The last is cheap, fast and genuinely good, and it is what a large proportion of people end up doing.
• What can wait — An enlarger, a second body, a light meter separate from the camera, and any exotic film stock. All are things to buy after you know you are staying.

The first stage is trusting the camera and the meter, which means knowing that when a frame is wrong it was you. That takes perhaps ten rolls, and it is mostly a matter of consistency: one body, one stock, one focal length until the results stop surprising you.

The second is bringing development home. It is a smaller step than it looks — black and white at room temperature is forgiving and the whole process is twenty minutes at a sink — and it changes the economics enough to change the shooting, because a roll costing a pound to develop is a roll you will actually use. Loading the reel is the only genuinely difficult part and it is a hand skill learned by repetition, in daylight, on a ruined roll.

After that the branches diverge more than they look. Bigger negatives — medium and then large format — is a path of increasing cost per frame and increasing deliberation, and it suits people whose enjoyment came from the slowing down. The darkroom is a different craft with its own long apprenticeship, and it is where film photography becomes a making hobby rather than a capturing one. Plenty of people do neither and shoot 35mm happily for decades, which is a complete answer and not a failure to progress.

• 35mm — The default and the cheapest per frame. Thirty-six shots, small cameras, and by far the widest supply of bodies and lenses.
• Medium format — Bigger negatives, eight to sixteen frames a roll, and a step change in cost per shot that changes the shooting again. The image quality difference is real and obvious rather than marginal.
• Large format — Sheet film, a camera on a tripod under a cloth, and one exposure at a time. A different discipline with movements that control perspective and focus in ways no other camera can, and a serious commitment.
• Home darkroom printing — An enlarger and trays, making prints rather than files. The most craft-like end of the subject and the one with the most distinct skill set — much closer to printmaking than to shooting.
• Instant film — A self-contained branch with no developing and no scanning, immediate results and a high cost per shot. Genuinely a different hobby that happens to share the word film.
• Alternative processes — Cyanotype, salt printing and the rest — nineteenth-century chemistry, contact printing, and a craft that overlaps with printmaking. The place where the hobby stops being photography and becomes chemistry.