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Comment by chuckkir | Hacker News Reader

I was talking to a friend who recently got into 35mm film cameras. He develops the color film himself, but then immediately scans it in and uses digital tools to work on the images. I left a bit confused; what is he gaining by using film as the medium?

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Film has a particular look and feel to it that I’ve absolutely never seen replicated in digital.

I’m confident that one day it probably will be; maybe ML will be up to the task where filters and transforms just can’t do the right job?

Besides that, the process of taking photographs is surprisingly different. You don’t spray and pray - a shutter costs you more than a dollar so you spend more time looking, and learn to hunt with your eyes more. It’s impossible to check your photos on the LCD, so you just get on with photography, and have an element of suspense to find out what you captured. Also, no batteries to go flat. There’s also a forced creativity when working with basic controls like aperture and shutter speed, instead of hundreds of different settings and knobs to get caught up in.

Of course, if I were a profession photographer these would in no way make up for the downsides, so hand me that 5d/d600/M-P, but they’re reasons you may still shoot film and translate to digital to share/store.

So it's sort of like the vinyl record thing then? I suspect the difference in photographs that you see is more in the difference between using an enlarger and photo paper vs. a color printer, and in this case I assume he's printing from the processed digital image. Assuming I'm right then he's not getting that advantage but I can see how someone with an enlarger could do things differently.

As for the technique, I agree that it was more exacting back in the film days. I also had much less money then. The net result was that I didn't take a lot of photos I now wished that I had. Although these days that's what we use our phones for so I guess it's not really an issue.

There is a lot of very nice gear available quite cheaply though. Maybe this will be a trend an it's time to buy Kodak stock?

One of the popular trends right now is scanning a film picture or a piece of physical artwork and then adding things with digital means. I'm not sure that the film adds anything whatsoever - nor the physical artwork since digital is pretty good at mimicking all of it. I think it is all about the process and the skillset a person is showing off. In his case, he winds up with an image that has a lot of steps, has a lot of room for error (film processing), and not many people can repeat his exact process.

People pay for this sort of thing as much as they pay for a clever gimmick.

I tried to muck around with color film processing once upon a time but I found it to be a PITA exacting process that was pretty much straight follow the recipe.

I totally get trying out B&W processing and printing for the sake of the experience even if I have no personal interest in trying it again. But color doesn't have any appeal whatsoever.

I can't imagine many people developing their own color film unless they like the process. It's much more involved than B&W and there's not as much room for playing around.

It's actually a little less involved than B&W. You don't have to look up developer/film times and there are no agitation timing techniques to worry about, because the process is exactly the same for every roll. The only annoying part is getting the chemicals up to 100 degrees rather than getting room temperature water straight from the tap.

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