P. Lynn Miller
Well-known
I know that Pickett Wilson has made it his life's mission to remind us of the impending doom of film... but I had a very interesting conversation with my local photo shop today... Charing Cross Photo in the Eastern Suburbs of Sydney.
I picked up a developed/printed roll of C-41 and dropped off 2 rolls to be developed/printed today. As I was leaving they mentioned that I could pick-up on Thursday, in two days time. I commented in passing that they must only run their C-41 line one or twice a week.
'Oh, not any more... we run everyday now', was his reply. He then told me that their film developing had been in steady decline until in mid-2009 they were only receiving 2-3 rolls of film per day and then one day there was no film dropped off, the first time in the 20-plus year history of the shop. After a few months of sporadic film drop-off, the volume slowly started to pick-up until they are now running at least 20 rolls per day, nothing set the world on fire, and their film sales have went increased several fold as well. And he sees this trend continuing for the foreseeable future.
He told me the biggest trend has been among mother's returning to film, they are tired of spending time trying to get nice family photos from digital files and never getting anything printed, while they can drop a film off and return the next day to pick up an envelope of beautiful photos. Apparently these mum's are buying up the top-end point-n-shoot cameras, Contax T3, Nikon 35TI, Ricoh GR-1, and even Leica was on the list, considering them cheap compared to the next big digital thing.
Hmmm... sounds familiar... had a big conversation over coffee early this morning with my wife and her frustration of having over 1000 unprinted photos on her digital point-n-shoot and how she wishes that I would just get her a really good film point-n-shoot camera let her return to the good old days of dropping film off at the 1-hour lab... and this is not first time this conversation has come up in the past few weeks.
I picked up a developed/printed roll of C-41 and dropped off 2 rolls to be developed/printed today. As I was leaving they mentioned that I could pick-up on Thursday, in two days time. I commented in passing that they must only run their C-41 line one or twice a week.
'Oh, not any more... we run everyday now', was his reply. He then told me that their film developing had been in steady decline until in mid-2009 they were only receiving 2-3 rolls of film per day and then one day there was no film dropped off, the first time in the 20-plus year history of the shop. After a few months of sporadic film drop-off, the volume slowly started to pick-up until they are now running at least 20 rolls per day, nothing set the world on fire, and their film sales have went increased several fold as well. And he sees this trend continuing for the foreseeable future.
He told me the biggest trend has been among mother's returning to film, they are tired of spending time trying to get nice family photos from digital files and never getting anything printed, while they can drop a film off and return the next day to pick up an envelope of beautiful photos. Apparently these mum's are buying up the top-end point-n-shoot cameras, Contax T3, Nikon 35TI, Ricoh GR-1, and even Leica was on the list, considering them cheap compared to the next big digital thing.
Hmmm... sounds familiar... had a big conversation over coffee early this morning with my wife and her frustration of having over 1000 unprinted photos on her digital point-n-shoot and how she wishes that I would just get her a really good film point-n-shoot camera let her return to the good old days of dropping film off at the 1-hour lab... and this is not first time this conversation has come up in the past few weeks.
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