Assuming you shoot a roll of film every single weekend, you end up spending 1k per year to develop it all.
Developing at home is not an option ( although I would be open to a magic machine that does it for me ).
You can Google around and find mail order processing for ~$5 a roll, and scan it yourself (flatbed with film-adapter, or for more money, dedicated film-scanning hardware that's usually much higher quality). You can develop black-and-white in a dark room yourself and probably get it cheaper. Not sure HN is the best venue for film-specific info, though; perhaps a film forum somewhere?
This has been a thing for a long time, I remember going with my mom to the drugstore after a holiday to develop a bunch of them. I bet they've thought of axing this for cost saving in the past but are now more than happy that they didn't do so with the resurgence of film photography over the past years.
Now I cannot recall the last time I saw an in-store film processing setup. From a quick google search, there are a couple of specialty shops, but the pharmacies mention 7-10 day turn arounds, so they're sending it offsite somewhere.
I’ve sometimes wondered what became of them all, were they able to recycle some of the materials, or are they in a bunch of landfills?
It's reasonably priced, but seems to be low quality these days (or I just got 1-2 bad batches).
I’m not exactly sure why that was the case, but convenience is a plausible reason: you need to be there to pick up your medicine, so why not get your photos developed at the same time?
So the corner drugstore will have prescription drugs, and over-the-counter drugs, and bottled water, snacks, school supplies, greeting cards, basic climate-specific items (winter gloves, sunglasses and flip flops), shaving, cosmetics and makeup.
And to maximize these economies of scope, they'll also have services: an ATM, Western Union money transfers, film developing, digital-camera printing, passport photo printing, photocopying, package drop-off, maybe even a key duplicator machine... you name it.
You can buy food, drinks, condoms, makeup, medicine, photos, and other things. It's a good business because most people need something to do while they wait on the pharmacist so they can purchase anything they need while waiting.
The first year I had a digital camera I shot over 2000.
I was happy with both, but now that I'm back on film, I'm VERY selective about my precious film.
Look through your film photographs and ask yourself if it was worth shooting each one and why. What value are you getting from capturing that moment. There's a chance a roll of film may last two weeks - cutting your cost in half.
For what it's worth, New Jersey Film Lab does good work.
And if you want to try developing, find a high school or college that has a lab and see what options they have. Black and white is a couple of hours to learn and develop your first roll. And, just as creative as the image capture process.
Granted, that first Mavica gave up a lot in quality compared with 35mm, but it's been a long time now since you had to make that tradeoff, and you can get a very nice APS-C body and lens kit for around $600. If you're primarily interested not in using film specifically so much as in in making photographs, that $600 kit can serve you just fine for a long time, at an incremental cost per shot of zero.
(Depending on body and system, you can even still use lenses made for film bodies - I haven't shot Grandpa's Nikkormat since the 90s, but I have quite recently shot its 50mm f/2 prime manufactured in 1967, on my D5300 body. Honestly, to my mind the lenses are at least 90% of what's worth keeping around from the film days, and it's often quite straightforward to use them with digital bodies whose capabilities vastly exceed anything a lot of those lens designers probably ever even imagined.)
In terms of objective qualities: digital sensors still haven’t fully caught up to film emulsions in terms of dynamic range. Digital sensors also tend to take “antiseptic” pictures, whereas half of the work of film was originally in developing emulsions that perform well at specific tasks and intentionally capture colors differently. Fuji in particular has done an incredible job replicating those emulsions in their digital cameras, but it’s not quite the same.
On the more subjective side: I have more fun when I use my film cameras than I do when I use a modern mirrorless or DSLR. I don’t know if everybody enjoys it in the same way, but I like having to do the reciprocity triangle in my head, having to know the specific qualities of the film I’m using, etc. Those elements are a big part of what makes it a tinkering hobby for me, rather than just something I flush money into so that I can perform it with the greatest tékhnē.
(All of this said, I take a mirrorless Fuji with me when I’m traveling. Digital is the best of both worlds for many, many occasions.)
source? A search reveals:
"A release by Kodak showcased that most film has around 13 stops of dynamic range. Today's modern digital cameras all average around 14 stops of dynamic range, "
https://petapixel.com/2015/05/26/film-vs-digital-a-compariso...
>Digital sensors also tend to take “antiseptic” pictures, whereas half of the work of film was originally in developing emulsions that perform well at specific tasks and intentionally capture colors differently.
This sounds a lot like taking the pictures in RAW format and then manually doing the adjustments yourself afterwards, rather than letting the camera's image processing algorithms do it for you.
> Well, IMATEST confirms the observation from the waveform plot above: there are about 12.7 stops max. dynamic range, but nothing more. Also, in the middle graph above the blue “12.7” line (indicating SNR = 1), there is nothing.
> If we look at the measured gamma curve (first graph in the IMATEST result above) – which is the used N-Log profile – it becomes obvious what is happening. N-Log as it is designed for now cannot hold more than 13 stops. If you look at the distribution of stops on the shadow side (to the left), there is a more or less horizontal line – meaning, that there is no code value differentiation between shadow stops anymore.
* https://www.cined.com/nikon-z-9-lab-test-rolling-shutter-dyn...
Sorting by Maximum PDR gives a top value of a hair over 13 with the Phase One IQ4 150MP (MSRP US$ 50K):
>However, dynamic range results stay below expectations – the Z 9 shows about 1.5 stops less dynamic range than its competitors from Sony and Panasonic.
That implies "its competitors" have a dynamic range of around 14.2 stops, which would put it above film cameras.
Moreover, I'm wary of comparing values like "stops" between various sources. In the two sources you provided, the Nikon Z9 has either 12.7 stops or 11.3 stops. That seems like a pretty big difference, especially if the original source says that the difference between film and digital is only 1. Are there any dynamic range measurements for film and digital cameras from the same source?
* https://www.dxomark.com/sony-a1-sensor-review-speed-and-qual...
Once you get in the ISO 200-400 range, things stop dropping.
Interesting experiment from a few years ago:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=idepJM8iHpY
* https://petapixel.com/2019/05/02/film-vs-digital-this-is-how...
Another factor to add into the mix is HDR with digital, and being able to combine multiple exposures in one.
I shoot film simply because I'm an old geezer who grew up with it and still have access to a color darkroom.
Something around 5 to 600, but I still love the idea film. Film. The idea of making something where you don't know exactly how it's going to turn out until a week later, you can't just do a reshoot instantly because you didn't get the shot you wanted.
So with that spirit, I would like to be able to get my film developed in scanned for cheap.
Might as well just shoot digital if that's the end result anyway.
Think of each of your digital camera sensor pixels as a cell containing an integer value, between 0 and let’s say 16383. During exposure time, it collects photons and accumulates its value based on how much light hits this particular pixel. While it’s close to zero, it’s strongly affected by noise floor (which is subject to numerous factors, including e.g. sensor heating up, and can affect pixels unevenly across the sensor). However, once it reaches 16383, it clips—which is a binary threshold after which the pixel is pure color (green, blue or red) and basically contains no useful information at all.
By contrast, as light hits your negative film it more or less chemically “burns” it into black, with no such binary threshold. (Paradoxically, on very low level, negative film is in some ways more “binary” than digital sensor—in that it consists of tiny halide crystals, each of which is either activated or not—but since they are layered, smaller, and as more crystals are activated each subsequent photon is less likely to hit an unactivated crystal, statistics play out such that thinking of it as burning light into shades of varying darkness is a useful mental shortcut.) When you develop film, it gets inverted and you get highlights smoothly fading into white, and it matters even after you print and scan.
A scene of any contrast becomes a tricky balancing act with digital—you really don’t want to blow out the bright parts, which are often small yet attention-grabbing (hence the most important advice for digital photographers is “underexpose to be safe and pull up as you convert to display-referred space”), but you also don’t want to keep the majority of the scene too close to noise floor. In this sense, film is much more forgiving and better suited for aesthetically pleasing yet casual in-the-moment shots.
I bought a Canon T2i with the EF 50-1.4 lens (far more expensive than the usual recommended EF-50 1.8) for $250 a few years ago. Although camera bodies do not deteriorate except when buying a heavily used camera with 20000+ shutter clicks, they still depreciate in value like all other consumer electronics. Consumer camera bodies have long since reached the "good enough" point for most users and now are just minor incremental evolutions. For Canon, that happened with the Canon XSi that introduced drastically improved autofocus and low light capabilities and especially the T2i that introduced full 1080p HD video support (T1i supported 1080 video but not at 30fps). This T2i replaced my previous Canon camera. My photography is effectively free. Let's just not talk about my lights and lenses...
The magic machine is called the C-41 process and they exist. :)
I mean, a "magic machine" would cost more than many years of lab services. It would use more expensive supplies than doing it by hand, especially because you wouldn't be doing the volume its designers expected. It would require a bunch of maintenance that's at least as hard as developing film. It would take up more space than any reasonable darkroom. It's hard to see why that would be an option when developing with tanks wouldn't be.
Also, digital is in fact a superior medium in 99.99999 percent of cases...
Citation needed.
I have a pair of Jobo machines, an ATL3 and an ATL2200 with the tanks and do-dads that go with them.
I also have an Epson v850.
I used these ( and earlier setups that led to this ) in college after a lot of figuring on the solution to your question. I decided that for my time/money math, and considering the quality and control I was after, this was the best fit.
Now, I can’t keep up with scanning everything now that I have kids and a full time job and renovations to plan, and I consider selling the whole mess every other day ( the others, I consider buying a Contax 645 )
A solid halfway place is to get a great scanner ( not necessarily the one I have, unless you like big big film, see below for the counterpoint) and take the film to whatever drugstore nearby still has their Fuji stuff.
Or, get a hand tank.
Wait, it’s way simpler than you think. You somewhere dark, or a changing bag ( I put a towel under the door of a closet before getting a bag ) and then you need a sink. It isn’t super complicated for black and white, though medium format film is WAY easier to handle than 135. Making prints may come down to a yard sale or Craigslist score, but local college dark rooms likely aren’t full, and art kids are handy friends to have.
That didn’t likely help unless your main takeaway is held very close to “film is about the love of the game” not economics.
Would you suggest that, I'm mainly shooting black and white?
Rodinal is about £20 a litre which will dilute to work for at least 25-50 films (probably more if you're doing single roll tanks).
It’s not so a drop-in replacement but far and away an “alternative process” that bears its own look.
I definitely remember the developing to be much easier than the printing.
edit: To clarify, I believe home developing IS as good option these days. My opening question was rhetorical.
Color may be easier nowadays because sous vide cooking gear is fairly inexpensive, and lets you keep temperatures constant. It was much harder to do this in the past, so B&W was easier (chemical-wise).
"Worrying" about pushing and pulling with B&W is an advantage to some because it lets you tweak your final print compared to what your exposure is.
Per Bruce Barnbaum, put your shadows in Zone IV so you don't lose information, and then print it down to Zone III:
My workflow for 120mm films is to wait until I have more than 5-7 rolls and process them one by one: while the previous one is in the developer, the next one is in the fixer. In this way, you can process them all very fast.
My biggest concern, though, is the environment. In the past you had special places where you could dispose used chemicals. But even then very few people cared, most just wouldn't care. Today even the last bath bothers me - it should be thorough to be effective, and I'd just prefer not to waste the water so much.
It is real pity that a few decades after the digital revolution in photography we're very far from being able to obtain results close to film. All digital solutions such as Silver Efex are still very far from the real thing.
Note I haven't used any of the above yet; I've just recently revived my own interest in film, so had the info handy.
There are also some simpler products that just make the process a little easier, like the Lab Box[2] which basically just offers an easier way to load the film onto the spool. Developing B&W film with this type of machine is pretty easy and the chemicals are cheap.
$15-20 is about right for develop + scan costs these days.
You can try to save some money by having the lab develop only, then scan yourself. Though, in my experience scanning takes up an entire afternoon so the extra $8 for those Noritsu scans is worth it.
If you're open to mailing film, it looks Citizens Photo in Portland is the least expensive: https://lenslurker.com/film-developing-by-mail/
B&W film is quite forgiving of under/over-exposure, and it allows for push processing. On the flip side, every type of film has its own developing time & some mild chemical preference.
Color film isn't very DIY friendly, but it does have the benefit of being very consistent from a processing perspective.
From what I've seen, it's usually a difference of 2x or 3x in price for black and white vs. color (C41).
"Cheapest" way is to develop it yourself, but of course, that's a different set of skills and equipment you may not be into. There's online labs but I doubt they'll be cheaper either and are much slower.
I shoot film too and had my best luck in an immigrant neighborhood. I develop my films in a family business and it's never over $6 per roll. This is in Brooklyn, NY.
I used to use Replicolor in Salt Lake City and I’ve used photoworks in SF. Both are quality places and cost about the same.
You could save some money buy buying your own scanner ($500 for something high-ish quality, probably 250 used.
https://www.costcophotocenter.com/Prints
Note: I do believe you need a Costco membership
I went out and bought a Canon Full Frame mirrorless, and that was that.
If you're willing to stick with black and white you can get sort-of close to "magic machine that does it for you" using something like Cinestill monobath. That will do several rolls for $20. Then you have to scan yourself.
Think about it this way. A brand new high quality full frame digital camera will cost thousands of dollars. Film camera prices are going up, but you can still get a very nice 35mm film SLR for just a few hundred depending on which one you want. The lenses for the film camera are almost definitely going to be dramatically less expensive as well. Then you add the cost of film and developing over time and now you're pretty much just coming into the same price range as the digital camera.
TL;DR: digital and analog are about the same price over time, assuming you are buying a brand new digital camera.
The only way to do photography on the cheap is to use your phone (that you were going to buy anyway) or to buy an older/used digital camera. And if you are strapped for cash, that is exactly what I recommend. Why buy a new camera that is a low-end model when you can buy an older camera that was the top-tier professional camera of its day? For example, the Canon 5D Mark II can be had for just a few hundred bucks, and that's just one option of many.
Why not?
Have been a happy customer for years.