Film photography- does anyone still do it?

[thecommonsmith 1]

Hi everyone, 

 

Me being a lover of film photography and still shooting 95% of my photos still with film. I was wondering does anyone else still shoot it ? 
 

id love to know who does and see people thoughts. Or even hear your stories of when you might have shot film. 
 

cheers 

Aaron 

[Algwyn 12]

Hi,

I have shot film underwater when I started doing scuba diving, about 25 years ago.

It was a totally different experience, and underwater the limitations of film photography are a huge impediment:

• you're limited to a film roll of 36 exposures. It's obviously impossible to change roll underwater, but also often between two dives (e.g. when you do two dives in a small boat where changing the film roll is not possible). So either you  take pictures very parsimoniously or you end up without film at the absolutely worse moment, or both ...
• it is much more difficult to adjust white balance on film, and the range of adjustment is very limited. I never shot BW film underwater, but there may be other type of challenges with BW that I cannot describe.
• you cannot change ISO, and the exposure latitude of film is very limited compared to digital. So you will be in many situations where you cannot expose correctly with film, which would have been no issue with digital.
• you need to wait until the film is developed to see the results. With digital, you can check the result immediately and adjust settings if needed. Shooting underwater often requires a lot of trials and adjustments which is not possible to do with film.

 

[Tinman 31]

I still maintain several Nikonos cameras and a housed Nikon 8008s system. The cameras see limited use as my digital system involves packing a lot of equipment. Some of the film gear occasionally makes trips where flying isn't involved. I do some travel via truck into Mexico.

As noted in Algwyn's post, using film presents some limitations. I've sometimes used my film cameras to mentally reset my brain to put more effort into composing photographs. It's easy with digital to operate in 'point & spray' mode.

I've packed film gear out to Isla Guadalupe a couple of times and captured images of white sharks with color as well as black & white film. During both of these trips, there was no shortage subjects so it was easy to switch between digital and film. The color images have a different look that digital. Interestingly, while I developed the black & white negatives, I never got around to printing them. I've still got the negatives stored around here somewhere.

Keeping my Ikelite Nikon 8008s housing in service has been a challenge. Replacement o-rings for the housing back proved difficult to find. Ikelite stopped making the o-rings years ago and the parts department folks didn't believe they had any old stock. I was able to research an obscure Ikelite part reference number and they discovered that they did have some. I purchased their remaining stock. The Ikelite service department will not attempt to service my housing. They're afraid they might break it.

As long as Bob at Southern Nikonos is willing to service my Nikonos cameras, I'll be able to keep them running. I'm not aware of anyone else in the U.S. who's still doing service work on Nikonos cameras.

I think using the film cameras from time to time helps me be a better photographer, but digital is lots easier. Getting my recently published book completed has been my major focus for three years and doing lots of shooting with film hasn't been much of a priority.

-AZTinman

[Larry C 24]

I occasionally take out my Nikon F100 with Sea & Sea housing.  I shoot slide film and have it processed by an outfit in SoCal.  I have the advantage of being able to use the settings from my Nikon D300 and D500 as a guide and an added plus is that Sea & Sea strobes are analog and shoot TTL without a converter with my Nikon, which has a built in TTL cut-off.  Processing is a bit pricey.  I pay about $10 for a roll of 36 and it's about $25 more to process it into slides and do a high quality scan so I can share them on the internet.