For B&W, it actually wasn't quite that bad with 35mm relative to today. For something like a football game, I might have shot 5 rolls (so 200 frames or so). Random assignments for a given day a roll or two. You made contact prints and printed up what was needed.
Definitely a bigger consideration than today but it's not all about quantity.
I have an anecdote, I believe from Herbert Keppler's column in Modern Photography from the early 1980s. A newspaper sports editor was complaining to him about the work of his photographers. He said, "Back when they carried Graflex 4x5s, I could send a guy to a game with 5 plates of film and he would come back with 5 usable shots. Now with motorized 35mm cameras, they shoot several rolls at a time and often come back without a single usable shot."
He could have gone with bulk rolls of 35mm film (100') instead of standard 36-exp rolls to save a few bucks on film, but then getting that processed as a single spool would have been a challenge.
One thing that's forgotten nowadays is that the old and even older 35mm films were a lot more grainier the ones we have now. 35mm started to gain bigger traction in the 60s and after that as the film stocks improved. Also 24-36 photos for the same price are probably more inviting compared to medium format's 10-16 photos depending on the frame size.
I love to shoot medium format but have couple of 35mm cameras laying around although the 36 frame rolls are too much for me and I decided that when I get the current 35mm stash shot, I'll buy bulk loader, empty containers and start creating that 10-16 frame rolls to get the amount sane and rolls developed more quickly.
I managed a full-service film lab back in the early 90s. C-41 neg, E-6 chrome, enlargements, copy prints/negs/slides, everything (we didn't do K-14, but just about everything else). We processed several hundred rolls a day, and I personally shot 10-15 rolls a week (we got film at cost, and processing was free).
So, yeah, I have quite a lot of experience with the nature of film photography.
Once the first decent DSLRs appeared on the market, I switched and never looked back.
Never at that scale or for that length of time, ordering a few dozen 36 exposure rolls of slide film of various speeds from B&H was always one of the rituals before I went on a big trip. As was the painstaking labeling, sorting, and editing when I got back.
Huge time sink for B&W, but sure nice to do, a major pain for color and close to impossible for slide film.
The latter was what I basically learned on, back the day, being allowed to sport my dad's back-up F4. Had to tie a knot in the sling for it to not bounce on the ground when I had it around my neck, me being too small.
Digital is so much easier, until you want to print. Upside of learbing on film, you are much more carefull at which pictures you take.
Maybe, one day, I'll get some B&W film and pull out said F4 again. Big maybe so, as I simply don't have the time to develop film on top of everything else...
As an amateur and untalented photographer, my results have benefited a lot from being able to shoot hundreds of photos and maybe get a single composition I'm proud of. Exposure, contrast etc has always been flexible to a point.
However, I really miss my bedroom darkroom from when I was 16-19.
Sheets pegged over the window, rags taped roughly over the door edges. Good enough for B&W print with a red dull light, but still had to load my rolls inside a hot and sweaty duvet cover because otherwise the negatives would get clouded in my ghetto setup. A £20 used enlarger bought from the local classifieds, a rough bench built with planks and rough-cut legs, nails and glue.
Got some great prints. Not many. Miss those days. I still have my Olympus OM2SP, best Camera I have ever used.
There's something to be said for knowing you only have a limited number of shots, and using another roll will cost money and real effort to develop. Makes you stop and think, in my opinion.
On the flip side, my entire "career" with 35mm I got 4 prints that I still love uncritically. My digital career has given me about 50 that I am happy to pay to have printed and put on the wall.
It wasn’t really that bad. It didn’t take much practice to get reasonably good results. Built-in camera metering worked well, and you got a feel for aperture vs. depth of field (sometimes that’s even marked on the lens). If you were trying for a special effect you might have to do an experimental roll, but ordinary circumstances typically “just worked”.
Punch cards, on the other hand, really were that bad. :)
I love shooting film, but I also have 30-40 undeveloped rolls, and scanning is another big headache. Film adds a huge overhead to your workflow, and I can’t blame people who don’t want to deal with it.
I’m not sure that’s true. In the days of film the average consumer shot <1 roll per year. Whereas a professional photographer would shoot a dozen or more rolls per day. Their biggest customers would have been newspapers and studios buying 10,000 rolls at a time on a regular basis
On a roll of 12 medium format shots, I usually get 3-4 tops that I'm happy with to print. On a 35mm roll of 36 shots, it was usually around 8 or 10. So from a quarter to a third. It's been years since I intensely shot digital, but I was probably closer to to 1~5% then. Film is nice in that it forces you to really stop and think about your shot.
I'd recommend consuming A LOT of photography if you want to get better. Pick a subject matter you want to get good at (landscape? fashion? black and white portraits? etc.) and immerse yourself in the works of the greats of that field. Go to photo galleries, museums, etc., when looking at the picture try to imagine how the image was framed, what choices the photographers made; and then try to emulate a bit of what you see in your own photography.
I don't miss the limitations of a roll of film, I usually took about 10-12 rolls of 120 film on a trip. thats 120-150 frames. Never bracketed, sometimes took two pictures of the same subject from different angles. The habbits carried over, with digital i shoot maybe twice as much (with about the same number of good pictures per trip, so for me more shots != more pics).
What i miss is the experience and workflow of a mechanical 6x6 TLR camera. You hold the camera at chest level, look down on the viewscreen, frame, then decide to take the picture or not. Nothing in digital does this yet.
If you were taking a photography class in the nineties, you would have probably been using B&W film: it's easier to learn to develop yourself, which meant it was easy to start playing around in the darkroom with the various ways you could alter a reel of film by playing with how you developed and printed it. Color film's a lot more complex. If not for a hurricane and a few cross-country moves I'd probably still have some prints of B&W photos I took in a college class, using the 35mm camera I inherited from my father.
If you were someone who was serious about photography to the extent of "I have a nice camera and know how to use it" - maybe it's your hobby, maybe you're somewhere on the path from "likes to take photos" to "makes a living as A Photographer" - then you would have been aware of working in B&W as a valid artistic choice that changes the overall mood of the imagery. A sharp, crisp B&W photo felt pretty modern versus a faded old one.
We work differently then. Personally, I think things are a lot better now.
I've shot a fair number of pictures (about 17,000 is the current Lightroom count) and I've just gone through and scanned all my film shots from pre-digital days. My strategy then was to shoot a bunch of exposures, painstakingly writing down the shoot setup (aperture, exposure times, etc.) After developing, I'd have to go back over my notes, compare the results against my notes and try to learn from it. It was an extremely offline way of learning.
Compare that to how easy it is now: I get immediate feedback and can change the shot until I'm happy with the result. I may take more pictures now, but overall they are a lot better than my old film ones.
With current technology you can get a lot more experience shooting. When the opportunity comes, when you happen to be in the right place at the right time, you have a much better change of not botching the shot.
I guess developing BW film is more expensive because there's just less volume? Most people shooting BW film probably develop it themselves while it's way harder to develop color film without getting a full lab.
The price for 35mm per shot is a bunch less for me. And it seems like people still have stocks o their old 35mm film rolls I can get for free-ish. Developing and scanning was something like 17 euros for me.
Seeing I spent 4.5 months to fill up my current 35mm roll I think I can accept the higher price per frame.
The most optimistic estimates of 35mm film detail come to around 16 megapixel -- but that's if you're willing to use 50 ISO film. Jump to 100 ISO film and that drops down to an embarrassing 7 megapixel equivalent.
* Film costs real money per shot.
* You can't confirm if your shot worked.
* You have to change rolls every 36 exposures.
* You have to change rolls to change light sensitivity.
* You have to change rolls to change white balance.
* Film is far less sensitive to light; modern digital sensors put it to shame.
* Creative freedom and experimentation is curtailed (for all the above reasons).
* You're limited by the quality of your scanner (good ones are expensive).
* You can't make perfect backups.
In the end though, you can shoot with whatever you want. There's a number of respected photographers who take amazing pictures with cheap pocket compacts.
35mm is great up to an 8x10 print. It'll do 11x14 if you don't stand too close. It's 30mp+ of optical resolution.
The thing to remember is that at the time, nobody was scanning, they were doing optical enlargements directly onto printer paper, with 6-element macro-optimized process lenses. That's a much higher-quality optical path than you get out of almost any scanner - drum scans and high-end CCD scans (flextight or similar) can get there but even midrange CCD film scanners struggle with 35mm and your average flatbed photo scanner doesn't stand a chance.
Nowadays digital has entirely displaced this flow - even at a photo lab you will most likely get prints made from scans. And they're much lower quality than contemporary prints would have been.
If they're B+W, try wet-printing those 35mm negatives sometime. Find a local college darkroom and get someone to walk you through split-printing on variable-contrast paper on one or two of your photos. You'll see.
But yeah medium format is incredibly easy to produce usable scans, by comparison. With top-end gear you can get just as much resolution off a MF negative as 35mm - you can do optical enlargement to several feet or even a yard+ on the long edge. But it's way way easier to get something usable for a 8x10 print or something off a MF negative than it is 35mm.
Still, when you shot film you rarely shot 20 frame bursts of the same baby-posing-with-toy that we do today with dSLRs. Simply because it was expensive and you were pretty likely to miss something important while you changed rolls.
If a photographer today has several thousands of pics from a day it's likely because there were lots of burst shots, and the culling should be pretty simple: take the best frame from a burst and delete the rest immediately.
On a side note it would be an interesting data compression challenge to compress bursts of raw frames using video compression techniques.
This thing films 1200 frames per standard 35mm camera roll!
It shoots 4 pictures on the 35mm film width. Which gives it similar specs to 8mm cameras. Constraint is : you can only film 300 frames at a time (a few seconds). But it makes the camera even more fun and unique.
Definitely a bigger consideration than today but it's not all about quantity.
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