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0 pointsvr462y ago0 comments

I don't think manual focus SLRs (If that's what you mean) are going anywhere now, there's widespread popularity for film photography and the "better" cameras (mechanical or reliable) are fetching silly money. And plenty of unreliable, hard-to-repair cameras are also fetching silly money.

BUT - the value prop has totally changed. Running costs are very high, for processing and scanning or printing, and where digital had high upfront costs initially for computers, everyone already has those now anyway. Plus the variety and diversity of film photography has narrowed considerably. I have a Kodak reference manual/catalogue here from the mid-1990s and the variety and versatility of film is something to behold. And that was just Kodak.

Infrared film? Colour or Black and White? Lith film, Ortho film? Here you go. Kodachrome? Yes, what speed would you like?

So there were things that digital can't easily do now that film could do, but without the film, that value prop has gone, and film cameras versatility has gone with it. If you, we, I, want film photography to thrive and be more than a dead language, we will really need it to do things that digital can't, apart from being slow, expensive and crap in the eyes of many.

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moritz2y ago

There’s people for whom “slow, and every shot is expensive” is a feature [1] but I agree – especially the loss of (color) film diversity has been hard to swallow and made everything considerably less fun. I still enjoy it, but I don’t know what I’ll do once my stash of deep frozen film runs out. With Fuji most probably having left the game, there won’t be competition for a cheap, basic color film – which IMHO is the thing that’s required to get more people into shooting film.

[1]: e.g. recently https://www.404media.co/how-and-why-to-get-into-film-photogr...

stavros2y ago

I don't understand it, but I have half a mind to mod CHDK to only let you take 72 photos a day.

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