Film photography has never been less expensive
Not long ago I gave one of my old cameras to a teenager I know who has a budding interest in photography. I had three Pentax K1000s and three delightful SMC Pentax M f/2 50mm lenses; he now has one of each. I hope he enjoys his new old camera! But I doubt he can appreciate that film photography has never been less expensive.
Not that it’s less expensive than digital photography. My everyday camera is digital – a wonderful Canon PowerShot S95. I take it on every road trip, get it out for family events, and sometimes shoot it just for fun. My S95 cost $400 and I bought a spare battery for $40. I bought a $5 SD card to store images, which I reuse after transferring images to my computer. For that initial outlay of $445, I can take great quantities of photos indefinitely.
Of course, film photography has ongoing costs for film and processing. I buy 35mm Fujicolor 200 for about $2 a roll and get it processed and scanned at CVS for about $6. If I shoot 35mm black and white film, or if I go for good old medium-format 120 film, either is available for as little as $4 per roll. But CVS can’t process those films, so I mail them to a processor who charges $14. So my total cost per roll falls between $8 and $18. In 2012 I shot about 20 rolls of film. If I use $13 as a rough mean cost, I spent $260 last year. You can buy a passable point-and-shoot digital camera for that money.
Still, film is a better value now than it was when I was a kid in the ’70s and ’80s. I remember film costing $3 to $6 per roll, depending on what format I was shooting. I shot a lot of 126 cartridge film, which I remember being the least expensive. Processing at my friendly neighborhood Hook’s Dependable Drugs ran maybe $7, which was a giant amount of money to me then. So I took to mailing my film to Clark Color Labs, which processed it and sent me prints for maybe $4. (The Clark prints faded within a few years; the Hook’s prints still look fresh today.)
When I take inflation into account, the differences become stark. I used the inflation calculator at the Bureau of Labor Statistics for these calculations. In 1980, shooting a $3 126 cartridge and getting $4 Clark Color Labs processing is equivalent to spending almost $20 today. If I splurged on medium-format 620 film at $5 and Hook’s processing for $7, I spent the equivalent of an astonishing $33.50 today!
In reverse, my $8 Fujicolor 200/CVS processing combo is only about $3 in 1980 dollars! If film and processing had been as inexpensive when I was a boy as it is now, I would have taken a lot more pictures!
The Pentax K1000 is a fine
starter camera. Read about it!
The sweet bottom line is no matter which technology you’re using, technically speaking in dollar-equivalent terms, photography has never been cheaper. :)
When I was 19 or 20 my folks came back from a trip to the Caribbean with the gift of an impressive camera and a couple of lenses for it. I had it for about ten years and if I shot two dozen rolls of film with it, I’d be surprised. The best use it ever got was when a friend who worked for a small-town local paper came by to borrow it (and me as his assistant) to take pictures of a train derailment in town. Otherwise, it largely gathered dust, and the reason was what you said: everything I did with it meant reaching into my wallet. I had an artsy hankering to shoot B&W but even in the 1980s they were really sticking it to you for B&W development. So I really wish they’d had the digital technology in the late 80s we had by, say, 2005 or so. I’d have a whole lot more memories and changed places recorded than I do, and mostly for that reason.
One other aspect is that now you can see if the shot you just took was good nor not, and if not, you usually have the option of trying again and improving it. With film you just crossed your fingers till the prints arrived. I just don’t think there was any kind of analog equivalent to that, and I’m so happy we’re able to do that today.
But I’ll grant you that film photograph has an element of art to it, at least in its methods if not necessarily its results, that’s largely been leeched out of digital. :) And more power to you and your collection, Jim.
Make no mistake, to the extent I have any skill at photography it is mostly thanks to my digital cameras, because I can shoot and shoot and shoot essentially for free until I get it right. I thank my manual film SLRs and rangefinders for teaching me about light via f stops and shutter speeds, though, so there is a symbiotic relationship there.
I’m planning a Spring Break trip right now, and will take a film camera along, but will still take 95% of all photos on the trip with my Canon S95 simply because there are no additional costs.
I do agree that photography is less expensive today than it ever has been. I do question the idea that digital is less expensive than film. I think that since most of us already have the computers that digital requires that we don’t count that expense. And then there is the storage. With film I have my negatives and if they are reasonably cared for they will yield images for decades. With digital to have that same kind of storage I have to have a primary and backup storage. And I have to keep expanding that storage as the number of images increases. All that is an expense I don’t experience with film. Then there is the probability that at some point that I will have to convert these images so that they remain readable. I do think that it could involve some time and trouble to keep today’s digital images in a usable form for several decades. On the other hand I have slides and negatives from 40 years ago that I have never had to do anything with.
I suppose I could go on and on about what I think are the hidden costs of digital. However that could get to be a pretty long comment. Just one last example is it would take a very expensive digital camera to reach the quality that you could get from an very inexpensive medium format camera.
I thought about the hidden expenses — but really, in this modern age most everybody has a computer already and uses it primarily for purposes other than storing photos. I considered calling computer storage thus “essentially free” but that didn’t entirely sit well. I will say, though, that with my 500 GB backup drive I’ve yet to come remotely close to filling it with my backups, of which my photos are a small portion (as I have a large collection of video that takes up most of the backup space). And let’s not neglect the hidden cost of storing negatives and slides — while not on par with buying a computer, boxes and sleeves and such do cost, take space, and have no shared purpose.
When I do digital I shoot in raw and convert the files to tiff for editing. These files are large enough that with backup I can easily fill up 500 gb in a few months. I suppose that is not typical since most people just do jpg, however it is a fair comparison to the amount of data that is in a film negative.
Yeah, I just shoot jpeg. It’s plenty fine for my purposes.
Too true! I learned on an old K1000, they’re great starter cameras.
To lower the cost even more, you should think about processing your own film. Maybe for 35mm it wouldn’t really be worth it for you, but for 120, it really is. After the tanks and other hardware are paid for, the cost per roll clocks in at around $.75 or less. Oh, this does require you to have a negative scanner, but it’s probably a good idea to invest in one of those anyway.
Plus, processing your own is just fun.
I’ve been thinking about investing in processing equipment, especially for b/w. I’m in a place right now where I can totally afford to pay someone else to process my film. However, I’d like to shoot more 120/620 but I’m impatient and hate waiting around a week for for the film to come back from the processor. On the other hand, I’m plenty busy as it is, and I can see several rolls of film backing up on me before I’d find time to process them. I have a negative scanner that does 35mm but would need to upgrade to one that does 120 too.
Lots to think about in this post. I’ll just add that there’s never been a better time to buy old film cameras. I have accumulated quite a large collection over the past ten years with the average price being somewhere inside the $10-$25 range. The simple cameras in my collection didn’t cost more than that when new, but quite a few others with more sophisticated features would have originally required well over a thousand dollar investment in today’s dollars.
You’re so right. I feel a special glee when I land a camera for $20 that cost $600 or $800 in inflation-adjusted dollars when new.
That makes shooting film even cheaper, when you factor in the cost of the camera. For the $100 to buy even a p&s digital, you can get a nice body and a bag full of lenses, and still have some left to buy film.
Some of my cameras cost $600 – $800 before inflation adjustment, That would be like $3000 in today’s money. Yet, they are tossed aside like stale bread because they are “obsolete”.
The thing about film cameras is that they’ll only be truly obsolete when the film is no longer available for them. Early digital cameras, however, are absolutely obsolete.