Is cost/convinience a major factor for your medium choice (film vs digital)?

[biomed]

The convenience, maybe, but the cost is definitely not a factor for me. The amount of money I have spent on digital gear is more than what was spent on film gear. Digital photography probably consumes as much of my time as film photography. I do not miss the chemicals and large volumes of water. There is no cleanup after a “digital darkroom” session and that fits my current situation well. I will continue to shoot a bit of film as long as it is available and labs are in business. My film scanners should last me a while. I appreciate all who still enjoy the film processes and hope you may continue to do so for many more years.
Mike

 

[cz23]

I recently bought an M4-P to try film again after many years of digital. Cost is not much of a factor, but I think I prefer the convenience and consistency of digital and will likely return to 100% digital. I feel digital allows me to concentrate less on processes and mechanics of photography and more on what I most enjoy -- looking and seeing.

John

 

[gho]

I voted yes! What is going on? Lately I am so busy that I do not have the time to develop and scan (!) the precious, beautiful film. Piles of undeveloped rolls are piling up and I do not plan to outsource the development. Apart from that my hit to miss ratio is a disgrace for that wonderful medium. I must confess that I am playing with the thought of going mostly digital and selling quite a lot of stuff.
Sounds reasonable to me.

 

[Keith]

For me it gets down to how much I like the output of the digital camera in question ... in the same way I like and dislike certain film emulsions. The thing is, sampling various film emulsions is a lot less costly than sampling all the digital sensors out there. Buying a digital camera only to find you don't really like it is a PITA because you are bound to lose money when you sell it if you bought new.

 

[MatthewThompson]

I finally got off the digital depreciation curve after chasing it since college. I shoot commercially, but the work in my area has mostly dried up to a few regular clients a year with the odd low-hanging fruit thrown in for good measure.

This will either differentiate me from others working in the region, or sink me. Either way, I've made a stand. Everything out there looks the same, and I've never felt "right" shooting digitally. I started on film, worked through college on film, and still shot film for personal projects. It's not like digital is going to be any more expensive as the years roll on, so it's far easier to jump back on the pixel train than it was to make the decision to disembark in the first place.

 

[gho]

[...]Buying a digital camera only to find you don't really like it is a PITA because you are bound to lose money when you sell it if you bought new.

Words of wisdom. For that reason I will surely keep my "film core set" to celebrate the unforgettable moments of life. 😉

Apart from that anything is good enough. 😀

 

[farlymac]

I love shooting film, but lately it's been a budget wrecker. So I'm reserving that for special usage, and concentrating on digital for now.

PF

 

[Cyriljay]

I have a budget for this hobby. That is what it is, a hobby. My photography has never brought in a dime, everything is outgo, not income. I shoot film because that is what the cameras I like use. Even before digital, when cameras became electronic and battery dependent with auto focus, auto exposure and LCD screens I lost interest in new stuff. I would never own one of those free form, melted plastic look Canon film EOS cameras. They may be wonderful picture taking machines but they just don't look "right" somehow.

The original, all mechanical Canon F-1, now that looks right.

Now, I don't shoot Canon, that was just an example of the way I think about cameras. My chosen platform for full frame film is Olympus OM-1 and OM-1n, both all mechanical classic cameras.

I own a leica and a Hasselblad and i love the result of the negatives and the colours of different emulations . I love the feeling when I shoot with negatives . Negative slows me down to shoot and give me time to concentrate on conceptual shooting. on the other way round i hate dealing with labs and more worry about some important films . dealing with scanning and time is a big factor and costly for me . so I switch in to digital with my M digital and it is convenient and love the clean files . hate how my hard discs are getting loaded up with files and work flow getting messed up for the time being as long as the films are available keep shooting films slowly and do in the both.😀

 

[Sejanus.Aelianus]

I voted "yes".

So far as I'm concerned, digital is both more convenient and much cheaper per shot than film. I'm still using my first digital camera, a Coolpix 990, bought new thirteen years ago. Based on the overall cost of ownership, it's currently costing me much less than one penny per frame. I have other, more recent digital cameras, all but one bought second hand for a fraction of their original price. The one that wasn't, is a Sony R1, bought when they were being remaindered off for around one third of the introduction price. Including expenditure on lenses and so on, I'd say they cost me two or three pence per frame.

I have Leica and Hasselblad systems also. I reckon that images from either of those costs me around 50 pence per frame for monochrome or one pound for colour. It also takes me at least ten times as much effort to get each image. This is a hobby for me, these days, so I'm prepared to spend the time and money, when I feel like it.

If you look at it in cold hard terms, digital is massively cheaper than film, provided you take advantage of its primary strength - the ability to take hundreds of pictures "per roll". However, photography, as practiced by this membership, is nothing to do with "cold hard terms", so everything I have written above is irrelevant to the choices we each make.

😉

 

[noisycheese]

I love shooting film, but lately it's been a budget wrecker. So I'm reserving that for special usage, and concentrating on digital for now.

PF

The only digital camera that really interests me much is the Leica Monochrom M. It costs $7950 USD. Talk about a budget wrecker!! 😱
Given that fact, I will stick with my M4-P and Tri-X.

I could get a Nikon digital SLR to use with my Nikon lenses, but SLR photography doesn't interest me much these days. Photographing my small, light, quiet M4-P is so much more enjoyable than shooting with a big, heavy, noisy SLR.

 

[kuzano]

Since my medium format choice (6x9) never costs me more than $10 per 120 roll, including prints
And since, my film is processed by Fujifilm labs on a professional basis
and since, the drop off point is less than five miles from my driveway
and since the turnaround "out the door" and "date back", is never more than ten business days
and since there is never a shipping charge to me either way.

Film will continue to be my film choice along with medium format for the foreseeable future.

No contest and digital cannot intervene favorably in those considerations.

Period... end of report !!!

 

[thirtyfivefifty]

Despite the rise of DSLR (or digital in general for that matter), I was reluctant to switch to digital. Well I dabbled for 4 months then switch back. The big change was when I experimented with slide film. That started the decline for me. I loved the super clean imagery, and the idea with digital to shoot full-frame, skip developing, avoid scanning, and buying all this extra stuff to have images downloaded straight to my computer? The freedom, simplicity, and flexibility and having control over everything color or black and white sums it up for me.

 

[huddy]

I use digital for convenience (and because my wife is annoyed with the time it takes to process and scan film. I think she forgets about culling and postprocessing digital images takes just as much). My preference is film. Either Leica M's or a Pentax 67. Sadly having to let my M6TTL go for now though... the D700 is more practical for the season of life I am in right now though.

 

[Frida]

Definitely. I'm not interested in playing with chemicals or paying each time I take ~36 pictures, so I use digital. If it were cheap to swap in and out a digital drop-in sensor (like a memory card, but a sensor) into film cameras, I'd be much more likely to pick up cheap rangefinder film bodies and use them. Since that's not possible, I'm all about looking for digital deals.

 

[clayne]

No, I have a fridge full of film, up to 8x10" sheets, and I can develop myself but recently the fridge stays always full and it is very rear I buy any film at all. I guess the main factor is the convenience of having an instant feedback of what I do plus having all the details in the metadata plus a shot of light arrangement. With film is is a lot of notes and Polaroid, not good!

GLF

It must have been a miracle they got any photographs made before 2002! Pure luck at that!

 

[mugent]

Convenience is a major factor, I have a couple of B&W rolls waiting for me to process them, I have very little spare time, and the time I do have, I might rather be doing something else. After processing, I have to scan them in, more time spent.

If I had some kind of machine, that I chucked a film into, then a few days later, the images appeared on my Mac, I'd shoot film a LOT more.

Yes, I could send off for processing, Australia has limited options for this, and it can be expensive, high resolution scans are crazy expensive.

Digital doesn't have the magic of film photography though, so I doubt I'll ever leave it completely.

 

[Kanamit]

Not really. I do enjoy the very low upfront (not long-term, of course) cost of film stuff these days and being able to buy what was once top of the line equipment for pennies on the dollar has a certain appeal. There's no way I'd be able to save enough money to buy a professional DSLR anytime soon.

But ultimately digital holds zero appeal for me, so even if it was free I would shoot film. I'm just an amateur, though.

As for convenience, I just drove 4 hours to pick up an enlarger, so clearly that is not a factor for me.

 

[Sejanus.Aelianus]

I'm just an amateur, though.

The original meaning of amateur is "lover of" and it's we lovers of photography who drive the business. Without amateurs, film would have gone out of production years ago. Without amateurs, cameras would cost far more for far fewer facilities. Without amateurs we wouldn't be writing to one another here because there would be no internet as we know it; Apache, PHP, Linux and mySQL are all the work of lovers of programming.

Never say you are "just an amateur", instead...

Say it now and say it proud
Say "I'm an amateur", right out loud!

😀

 

[c.poulton]

I'm often asked by people "why do I still shoot film"?

The best answer that I can give has already been given far more eloquently by Eric Kim here than I ever could.

Cost is not a factor for me.

 

[thegman]

I voted "yes".


If you look at it in cold hard terms, digital is massively cheaper than film, provided you take advantage of its primary strength - the ability to take hundreds of pictures "per roll". However, photography, as practiced by this membership, is nothing to do with "cold hard terms", so everything I have written above is irrelevant to the choices we each make.

😉

The reason I use medium format more than 35mm is that I don't want to take 36 shots on a roll, let alone hundreds. I think that 'strength' is only appropriate for those who want to take hundreds or thousands of photos, but I don't really, so it does not apply to me. It's not a matter of cost or convenience, I just don't want to take hundreds of photographs, free or not.