Fujifilm Warns Its 35mm Films in Short Supply ‘For the Time Being’

You can shoot these cameras fully automatic still

The X100V's autofocus is good enough that you don't need to zone focus. I doubt most people use it to zone focus tbh.

Not op, but experience mostly.

Shooting jpeg and using the out of camera images is a different workflow from shooting raw and fiddling with them in post.

I worked in minilabs back in their last days. We were careful about what could go down the drain and what couldn't, but interestingly I don't think we paid anything to deal with the waste chemicals. They had to go through a recovery process that could then get dumped down the drain, but the waste actually contained silver (famously intertwined with film chemistry through history), and I think those recovery filters may actually have been provided to the company for free because the revenue came from re-cycling the silver.

Film is "coming back" a little bit, much like vinyl records. I am hoping that this helps keep prices from going up, because film photography has already become quite an expensive hobby. Film alone is expensive now ($15 for 36 exposures for 35mm, for the good stuff), even if you develop and scan your own negatives.

That simply isn’t true. With B&W the only aspect of film development that poses environmental worries is the silver suspended in exhausted fixer. You’d have to be doing much more exotic work to require more precautions. Things like Selenium toning, perchlorate (ugh, nasty stuff) activators, potassium ferricyanide, etc. need more care but the processes that use those things are really rare these days. Developer compounds break down rapidly and stop bath is just a mild acidic solution, usually the equivalent of vinegar. With the exception of the fixer, home darkroom work is of no environmental consequence. Kodak, Fuji, and Agfa had gotten chemical safety figured out by the 90s. The last thing I remember being a problem was the stabilizers made from formulin (related to formaldehyde) but that was stopped in the late 90s. Think VPS was the last film that required it for the best archival performance.

Large quantities of developer/stop/bleach were also able to be disposed of once the ph had been neutralized. The only disposal service I remember with the labs I worked in was the silver recovery for the fixer.

As far as manufacturing films and papers goes I’m less certain. I do know that Kodak had been trimming some materials from their catalog that used dangerous materials through the 90s. They discontinued a warm tone paper that was loved by many in the early 2000s. It used cadmium as part of the emulsion chemistry. And while it didn’t pose any risk to people using the paper, manufacturing it certainly did. I’m sure that the big three film manufacturers had managed to minimize the use of dangerous materials as awareness and regulations spread. Can’t be as sure about the eastern European manufacturers though.

I think you missed the "rather".

I think this is the guy eating all the tide pods.