Younger film users?

Started with digi, shot that for about 6 months, picked up a LTM leica and now I shoot bw with Leica M and colour slide with Hasselblad. I have my own darkroom (I transform my parents' bathroom 😛) I bought a 6x6 slide projector the other day, also very nice!
 
> Firstly, I would like to apologise for reviving an old thread.

Great Job reviving this thread, it really makes us "old-timers" happy to see the younger generation using film. The time is great to pick-up and use classic equipment.

And at RFF- you never know when a thread started in 2005 will pop back to the top.
 
Just to follow-up, I ended up giving away a Konica Autoreflex "T" w 40/1.8 and a Canon AE-1program to two students yesterday. Both expressed interest in shooting film, and had experience with digital. I've placed a Yashica TLR, Kodak Retina Auto III, a few Polaroid 100 pack cameras, and others to people expressing interest. Nothing that cost more than $20 or so and needed a little of my time put into. Most of them were given to "the younger set".

So, if you come by those garage sale bargains you might pick them up and set them aside to get someone hooked into using film. They might like it, and keep the medium going for another generation. Anyway, that's my evil plan.
 
Brian Sweeney said:
So, if you come by those garage sale bargains you might pick them up and set them aside to get someone hooked into using film. They might like it, and keep the medium going for another generation. Anyway, that's my evil plan.
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Dear Brian,

Great stuff!

And thanks to those who revived the thread.

I tend to use digital for record or colour, and film for B+W, where digi is a poor second in my book.

Tashi delek,

R.
 
This is a thread that needs to be kept updated and nerar the top of the list. There are plenty of schools teaching photography and most all the courses I know of are film based. At times it's difficult for them to schedule darkroom time because of too many students and too few darkrooms. It's also difficult for them to find relatively inexpensive used film SLR's, rangefinders, or TLR's. They're always looking for cameras for the students and I've donated a few yard sale finds, most recently a Minolta X-700 that I picked up for next to nothing. I've also let several students use my darkroom.
 
Al Kaplan said:
This is a thread that needs to be kept updated and nerar the top of the list. There are plenty of schools teaching photography and most all the courses I know of are film based. At times it's difficult for them to schedule darkroom time because of too many students and too few darkrooms. It's also difficult for them to find relatively inexpensive used film SLR's, rangefinders, or TLR's. They're always looking for cameras for the students and I've donated a few yard sale finds, most recently a Minolta X-700 that I picked up for next to nothing. I've also let several students use my darkroom.
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Dear Al,

To use an old formula, God bless you and keep you!

Tashi delek,

R.
 
I'm 25. Started with my Nikon D80 4 years ago..I went Nikon Because I knew I wanted the option of using old and new glass and canon switch mounts. So I only bought fixed prime lenses and shot away. Eventually I got an FE2 and never looked back. Begining this year I got my First Leica and now I'm not looking back at SLRs. I think Medium Format will be next but I'm holding off for now🙂 I think there are a lot of kids that are starting digital and moving to film. Digital is just too clean and perfect..Almost flat and boring. Like a Digital vs. Analog audio recording or solidstate vs. tube amplifiers, analog is just warmer and has something special about it.
 
Al, I've never shot kodachrome II, but I was raised on the stones on 12 inch vinyl, along with CCR, Clapton, Hendrix... my dad didn't have cameras, but he had about 400 albums.
I really only got into film photography around the beginning of last year. I learned the basic principals of photography by learning digital first. The place I worked for used Fuji S1 Pros in 2000 or 2001. I think this turned me off photography for awhile. I guess camera makers had to start somewhere, but 25 sec to write a tiff file and $700 micro-drives that lasted about a week because photogs squeezed them.
Now I'm developing in my bathroom and putting a darkroom in my garage.
All that said, I'm 35 and I feel like a student photographer. I hope I feel this way in 30 years... a student still learning.
 
I started making photographs over 34 years ago, I turn 42 in a few days. I have been shooting digital professionally for over 15 years, helped to work out some of the flash exposure kinks in 94-95 for Kodak / AP.

I am moving away from digital now, the reward of hard work and clients who trust my vision. There is nothing wrong with digital, I just like film better and I know how to shoot it.

And I love how many young people are getting into shooting film, that rocks!
 
I'm 22 and I've been shooting for 4 years. Started off with a borrowed Nikon F4 in NYC during reading week. Got myself a D70s afterwards and shot for a year and a half with that. Changed to a D200...got my first gig as a photographer for the university yearbook. That led to an internship at a daily newspaper in Hong Kong (HK Economic Times). That internship pretty much killed the D200 but I was using the F100 and the Bessa R2a at the same time so I plowed on with 400H! Now I have replaced the D200 with a Canon 1D Mkii and I've replaced the F100 with a Leica M2. I'm hoping to use the Canon and the M2 when I'm doing my internship for Reuters in HK this summer!
 
I have just turned 40 and up until a few months ago was firmly pursuing the Digital track. Having bought a Canon Powershot S3 IS I found that this had limitations where photographing sports or low-light situations was concerned. Consequently I bought a 40D last year, and set-about buying the lenses I would need. This set me off down the 'only an L-lens will do' path with the corresponding costs involved. I suddenly noticed two things:
1. that I was planning to spend ever increasing sums of money and expecting perfection with every photograph - when viewed at 100% resolution on my monitor.
2. that I rarely printed any of the photographs that I had taken.

Shortly after this I spotted a website comparing 35mm film cameras with 'pro-spec' DSLRs using prints from each in 6X4 format. The conclusion: at this size of printing, most people will see no descernible difference in 'perceived' quality.

Quietly feeling foolish, I started reading about 35mm rangefinders and am having more fun with this 'low-tech' equipment than I have had with my DSLR so far.

I am planning to play around with the cameras that I have bought so far (Olympus Trip, Fed 2e, Fed 4, Zorki 4, Zorki 4K and an Olympus XA) before settling on two or three to keep. I also have a weather-eye out for a meduim format camera: TLR or folding - I can't decide so far!

I won't be selling the DSLR any time soon: it's too useful (some might say appropriate) for rapid FPS shooting for sports. However, when we went to Disneyland Paris recently, it only came around the park with me for the first day. For the remainder of the visit it was relegated to the hotel room for being just too big and bulky.

Sorry for the long post - just had to get that of my chest....
Best regards,
RoyM
 
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To me, having gone from film to digital back "mostly" to film, there's just something about the look of film that has more character and is more interesting than digital in black and white. The old fixed focal length lenses are gems - and many are super cheap. I laugh sometimes when I read threads about DSLR owners asking, what adapter? How do I use this on my automated DSLR - what setting? And the crop factor...

I want to write - spring for $30 - the cost of that M42-Canon DSLR adapter (or whatever), and use that beautiful SMC Takumar 50mm 1.7 you paid $20 on eBay on a proper K-mount FILM camera...
 
It won't work, Nick. There's something in most peoples' genes that compells them to lust after, own, and flaunt the newest, most expensive and complicated piece of technology they can find. Results matter not. Most of them are all too well aware that they couldn't make a decent photo no matter what, so they confine themselves to treating the GAS syndrome.

Then there are always those who would obsess that X brand adapters are .0086mm thicker than brand B, or they have a black body and black lenses and the adapter only comes in chrome.
 
I'm 16 and have been shooting film for around 3-4 years. I've shot around 200 rolls so far, and I love how I can get a pro camera for the cost of a cheap digi P&S, and developing and printing my own film is great. Then there's the cameras that have no digital alternative, like the Zorki's and the Olympus XA. Plus film just looks different, more saturated, and more real.
 
I'm hardly young at 47 but apart from a bit of early learning off an uncle who was semi-pro (I have vague recollections of using an Olympus Trip and something big, black and complicated on a tripod that may well have been a Rollei SL66 and of seeing his darkroom with the strange bulbous enlarger head that looked vaguely like a Dalek), I didn't touch a camera until a few years back. Then I got interested in digital cameras via the excellent Olympus 5060 (originally bought for the wife)

I got enthusiastic and progressed to a D200 with a big fast 'normal' zoom, and then got some nice old moderate length teles and the new 105 VR ABC XYZ micro, which I still use for my nature-hippy stuff. I got frustrated with the sheer size of it when I developed an interest in urban photography though and moved first to an old F3 which gave me a taste for the film 'look', the feel of solid precision machinery and taking responsibility for focus and exposure.

It eventually occurred to me though, that what I liked about it was what rangefinders are supposed to be good at, so that led me to spend the money I had earmarked for the D700 to gain a different but for me possibly more useful capability. So I got the R2A & Biogon 35/2 kit I've been using lately (although the F3 with an AIS 105/2.5 and maybe an AF 180/2.8 in the bag makes an extremely useful backup, spotmeter and 'everything else' camera)
 
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stuken said:
Being in the unique position of being an Instructor at one Art School (for kids 2-18) and a student at Emily Carr university I see two major reasons for young people liking film. One, the hipsters/scenesters/lomography crowd. Their alternative life style revolves around vintage, so there is a large, and growing, popularity to shoot classic SLRs ect. My students, who range from 9-18, all love the process of the darkroom, and seeing their prints come to life.

For me, I enjoy the work flow of film. I also enjoy film cameras, they're much more enjoyable to use than my DSLR. I also shoot alot of medium and large format, a process that I can't copy digitally, and I dont have 40,000 dollars lying around to drop on a Hd3 or the like.

All that said, digital has its place. When I'm shooting jobs I rarely use film. The process of digital lends it self very nicely to most forms of professional photography.

Oh yeah, I'm 21, been shooting for 7 years.
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that's it. i have the same view and i am 52. love rolleis. love contact sheets but i know no pro can afford to shoot film right now. the digital image is too good, workflow is fast and safe and that's how the market is working..
when it comes to independent, personal, art work, film is rulling. large format is booming. galleries are crowded w/ BW contact prints of 8x10.
35mm right now? i don't see much of it going on.
 
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