There is also something to creating a physical thing that is immensely satisfying. Bits are bits and no matter how useful they may be they end up feeling very much the same as ever other undifferentiated bit in the trillions of photos, sounds, programs, spreadsheets, etc. Capturing light on film and then splashing them with chemicals results in something that you hold in your hand and now is a unique object.
So yes, digital photography is very useful and cost effective. Film photography is about fun or challenging yourself. It causes you to practice deliberate decision making in a creative process. If that sounds meaningless or stupid then it isn’t for you.
Exactly. As someone who DJs (I know - the most low-skill hobby in existence), beatmatching by ear rather than using computer displays is helpful because it teaches you to listen to the music you're playing and how your mix sounds (the main output of DJing) rather than doing something because a screen says it's optimal.
The wide variety of form factors keeps things interesting. Yesterday I went to shoot a sunrise, and I took a panoramic 6x17, a pinhole 6x12, and my TLR (which I didn’t shoot) at 6x6.
Everything about shooting film is more deliberate. Simply loading a medium format is typically time-consuming, developing the negatives, and if you’re lucky enough to have access to an enlarger, creating your own prints is very satisfying.
Slow but rewarding.
And I spend all day in front of a computer; it’s nice to have a very analog hobby.
Which is only important if all you care about is a straight line towards perfection. But imperfections can make a work interesting and spark creativity.
> I can be doing group photos at a festival and review the photos I just took
That’s a feature for you, but for many it’s a bug. Friction matters. You can remove friction or add friction to change your behaviour and thus your outcome.
You seem to derive satisfaction from getting as good a photo as you can get straight away. Perhaps you even delete ones which look “wrong”. But other people prefer to carry on with the moment instead of pausing it to review what they just did. Whatever the photo will be, it will be, they don’t even think about it anymore until it’s time to get the film developed and relive the memories at that point. And because they had to make choices (film is expensive) they pay much more attention to each photo and appreciate it on a different level even if someone had their eyes closed.
There’s no right or wrong here, to each their own.
Also a bit sick of having thousands of photos that I'll never get around to curating into anything worth my time looking back on. They all just get dumped on an external hard drive and never looked back on.
RE: the cost it can be cheap enough. B&W is very easy to develop at home for not much and if you get a half frame camera you can get 72 shots from a single roll which can take an incredibly long amount of time to get through.
Only if you’re a nerd that thinks in terms of data collection. Some film stocks produce beautiful images that aren’t easy to emulate. Why paint or draw with graphite when you have an inkjet?
1. The nostalgia comes from a few things, one of which is the nostalgia for the time and place where film was common, rather than for the film itself, the film becomes a hallmark or totem.
2. Kind of, but also not really. Besides the fact that there are many formats of film, it's possible to get >800 lp/mm of resolution in some films, and the best color films were in excess of 150 lp/mm. Even thinking about lp/mm obscures what film does, because with any analog format (this isn't just limited to photography), falloff outside of the resolving power of the medium is done on gradual curves, as film doesn't have "pixels". To a close approximation, it's only within the last 3-4 years that digital cameras have achieved equivalent resolution to color films, and they /still/ don't achieve equivalent resolution to fine art black and white films at full frame (35mm) size. Additionally, film and digital are fundamentally different not just in capture, but in expression. Digital images are emissive, while printed images are reflective, that is when you look at an image on your screen that image has uniform brightness defined by the backlight of the display and limited in color reproduction by its CRI and gamut, when you look at a printed image the brightness and color reproduction is limited by the print process and the room lighting, looking at a printed image under studio lighting, gallery lighting, or in sunlight has a higher perceptual quality than any digital image on any screen. Does that mean film is better than digital? No, not at all. You can print digital images too, and they will look better printed at high quality than they do on your screen when under good lighting conditions.
I primarily shoot digital these days, although I do occasionally use a 4x5 or medium format film camera. Having tried digital backs for medium format, I can strongly say that once you get outside of full frame, digital still has a long way to go to match the quality of film.
From a utilitarian, “f/8 and be there” perspective, my iPhone today is way way better. I always have it with me and it handles pretty much any light condition I encounter, including near darkness.
And I took a 4/3 mirrorless digital body with a zoom lens to Africa recently, and got tons of sharp, well-exposed photos of wildlife.
But a slide is a picture, in a literal physical way. There’s no format or device needed. I hand it to anyone, and they can hold it up to a light and see the picture. It is a piece of art the way a sculpture is a piece of art; it embodies itself. I can keep it like a book, hand it over, pass it on. That is very cool, and looking through my old slides is satisfying to me in a way that opening up my laptop and scrolling through pixels is not.
This is why I love keeping an Olympus PEN-F w/ the Olympus BCL-15 f/8, which is a "body cap lens". It literally slides into my pocket even in tight jeans and gives me all you can expect out of a solid m4/3 camera with fixed aperture. It's not super-sharp, but so what, it's there and it captures interesting images. I really make an effort to only use my phone camera for taking pictures of receipts to submit to Concur, but I totally get the temptation, for those momentary snapshots a phone camera is so good these days, but since you like m4/3, thought you should know that things like the BCL exist.
Why even put it in terms of ‘nostalgia’? When someone takes up watercolor painting, do you also dismiss this as ‘nostalgia’? Why is film photography as a hobby any less interesting or legitimate on its own merits than making pottery the way it was made 10.000 years ago?
I often find it’s an older (even elderly) crowd that dismisses film-photography in this way. They maybe shot film when they were younger, discovered digital (which they always describe as being “objectively superior” - as though two totally different media can be compared this way), and then dismiss film users as somehow deluded ‘hipsters’ or as people merely indulging in nostalgia.
In my case, as someone who took up film photography 15 years ago, and shoot it alongside digital, I find film not only a more satisfying and thoughtful process, but also a superior artistic artifact: I prefer film’s color, the subtle ways that film handles highlight falloff, and even the ‘accidents’ that happen when chemical and light fuse to create an image.
Incidentally there are more and more ways to enjoy the entire process without a darkroom nowadays: a changing bag and a unit like the AGO film processor from Vintage Visual [0] make it simple to just take out and pack away all that’s needed to go from photograph to scan and print without a lot of space or mass of hassle.