glad I live in LA
glad I live in LA
At least for now.
Samys Cameras on Fairfax carries every imaginable film. Actually, not really obscure stuff. Not some of the specialty films, but everything else. And their prices are very stable. And when i want something they don't have on the shelf, it only takes a day or two to get it. No one carries Ilford HP5 is 4x5 in Seattle, that I know of anyway. Correct me if I am wrong, please. Samys has it though. They even have 120/200 Pan F - which is remarkably difficult to find.
I do find, however, that processing fees are climbing steadily. And printing fees are very expensive compared to the ease of production that the digital method allows. I mean, they are charging me the same price for truly crummy digital prints as they did for custom traditional prints - and the quality is way lower.
I would agree that the enthusiasts and professionals are the remaining market . . mostly enthusiasts because the professionals are noticing increasingly that they gain nothing in business by shooting film over high-end digital for 99% of clients. The prices will climb. It will become necessary to print your own stuff, send it off to mailorder developers, or just resort to scanning from film for those prints.
In some ways, I would have to say that I am really happy about some aspects of the new modernization or mutation, however you choose to see it. It would have been impossible for me to shoot a 4x5, get it developed, scan it, edit the heck out of it in Photoshop, and have it printed on the Lightjet. It is nice to be able to totally control the image in a way that the old masters would have only dreamt of. I used to spend 4-6 hours at a shot in the darkroom with the chemicals and the dimness to produce series of optimized images, but now, I can spend less time and get the product closer to my ideal - and spend less money at it.
I do believe that film will be around for a long time. Because people will always have a use for it. Large format, for instance, will have it over digital sensors for a very long time, seeing as there is no logical market for 500-1000 MP sensors that would warrant the production costs. So, I will comfortably straddle both worlds, using my old Graflex Crown Graphic 4x5 press camera, a nice film scanner and photoshop to make all those guys and gals with their 22MP H1s look bad.
Ansel Adams in the darkroom, perfecting one of his legendary prints surely practiced that segment of photography in a way that the digital age has threatened and will likely drive into history. Now, we can go into a photography gallery and see images that are pixelated, poorly presented, printed, etc (without intent specifically to make use of that quality as art in itself) and are selling for thousands of dollars. Beside classic prints that were painstakingly produced by traditionalists selling for similar prices. I know that nitpicking image quality in art is somewhat inappropriate, but the process is part of it. It should be, at least. I suppose, I see such mediocre methods of printing and presentation as one might see a painter that makes shoddy photocopies of his work on an office copier, frames them and sells them for what he might have sold the original. And this sudden abandonment of quality is showing up in nearly every medium of printed work from magazines to posters to ads and in galleries.
Digital users need to be put in their place. Know that it is really very obvious when someone uses digital. Maybe it doesn't matter though, because the viewing public never notices. Digital can't be passed off as film without considerable editing when caring viewers are looking. There are artists that shoot with 6-8MP DSLRS that know what they are doing, and respect the old attention to quality that the traditionalists never forgot - and they spend hours retooling a digital image to create film like tonality. But still, old Ansel Adams prints make the new digital work look aweful.
There is a gallery on La Brea, called the photographer's gallery or something like that, which sells some prints that are obviously terrible scans of old 35mm slides. This is a really good example of how the market is proving that obsession with quality doesn't pay off. Sadly. But to us, it always will, because the image means something not only for its subject, but for its presentation - the image itself, regardless of subject matter, means something and can be measured as a work separate from the subject.
Getting back to the post topic, with all that in mind, or not, film will be around for the highly detail oriented, process obsessed artists. Not so for the professionals - I can't imagine film surviving the professional test of speed and cost.
long post.
