Eugh, film photography just keeps getting more expensive by the day
Photography gods — if you’re out there, please hear this prayer and help us. At this very moment, I feel like film photography is almost dying out, due to the ever increasing prices of film and cameras. High costs are killing the vibe and I really hope things are going to turn for the better soon.
I usually want to stay away from negative topics, but I also want to join the choir and share my concern about the current film price situation, because I’ve always been such an avid film shooter and it is hard to let the medium to suffer like this. As you may know, prices of both film cameras and stocks are much much higher than in ages. I don’t necessarily need new cameras at the moment, but film is a running cost. I’m willing to pay up to a certain extent, but the rates are starting to reach a very critical threshold. I personally can’t see myself actively continuing shooting on film with prices ranging generally between 10—25€ per 36 exp roll.
I’ve been mostly a hybrid shooter, going back and forth between film and digital. I shoot only 35mm at the moment. (I’d really like to get into medium format again though.) Few years ago I was shooting maybe 90% film, but at this very moment, due to the circumstances, it’s the other way around. I want to save whatever small amount of film I have left in the freezer, thus I tend not to lean more and more towards digital to save some precious film money. I’m not buying nearly as much film right now, because I cannot justify the cost, even though I’d literally LOVE to, but I’m just too price sensitive to spend that amount of money.
Couple of years ago colour negative films got way too expensive, but at least black and white seemed to be safe, until now. Dear god, even it is starting to get way too expensive. By the time of writing this, there are couple of places that seems to sell their stock with reasonable prices, but for the most parts, B/W films are generally way beyond 10€ per roll. Ilford still seems to somewhat bearable, Kodak is out of the question and the rest, for example Foma I’m not too excited about, even though it is certainly the cheapest and within the boundaries of reasonably priced. Bergger also seems to be still a fairly priced option at this very moment at 7,90€ per 36 exposure roll, from my local shop. Luckily I happen to like Bergger, so at the moment I’m mostly stocking up on that. All in all, the options are running low. I honestly miss buying Kodak Tri-x.
I still love film, but considering the circumstances, I’ve also started to experiment with alternative ways to achieve a similar kind of look. This is a cliche I know, but in terms of image quality, digital has always struck me as too perfect. For example, it’s way too sharp to look organic and natural. Whenever I edit digital images, I often like to add some amount of grain or tweak the colours to be less saturated. I also enjoy Fujifilm cameras very much. The film simulation recipes is an interesting new world to explore new organic looking in-camera techniques. I’ve experimented with a bunch of recipes of my own, such as the Grainstorm 3200 and Vibe Blaster 800 recipes. As nice as they look, they still, of course, are not the same as actual film, because the process as a whole is just very different.
