Is film getting too expensive?

 

 

I love shooting film and my Nikon F2, but I am almost exclusively a black and white shooter. I have been shooting black and white film for many years now and it is what I enjoy doing outside of work. But during the rapeseed season in China, I realized that shooting the rapeseed flowers in black and white does not do justice to the explosion of yellow that assaults your eyes for that two week period in China, so I dove into my film cabinet to see what color film I had lying around.

 

 

Usually, when you buy a second-hand film camera in China, you get a free roll of film with the camera. Mostly it is the cheapest film that the camera store has, and it is usually Shanghaifilm but sometimes I would get some color film such as Fujicolor. I never shot the color film, as I had no interest in it and simply stored it with the rest of my film. The above image is digital, shot on my Nikon Z6, and I thought it would be great to shoot some color film this time, so I quickly did a quick search of my film inventory and found out that I had three rolls of color film and went out to shoot some of the flowers. I knew that I didn’t have any chemicals to develop the color film but I figured that if I got around 15 rolls of color film shot, then I would buy come chemicals and develop it myself.

 

 

I was enjoying my shooting, I kind of liked the idea that I would not be seeing these images for a few months and like all 35mm film shooting, shooting 36 shots in a roll of film can take a long time to do. Finally I finished all 3 rolls and I went online to buy some more film. I was shocked at what I saw, color film has become so expensive now in China. Black and white film has been rising slowly in price over the last 10 years but if you shoot some of the cheaper stocks, such as Ilford Pan400, it is not too bad. But at the price of color film now, it is crazy.

 

A roll of Fujicolor is over $10 now. That is crazy. I could shoot two rolls of black and white film for that price.

 

 

Kodak gold is the most popular color film with my Chinese friends but it is also crazy expensive now. $10 a roll is just too much to stomach for most people I think. But even some black and white film stocks have become very expensive.

 

 

Ilford HP5 is probably my favorite film stock to use but I haven’t shot it in years now. It is nearly double the cost of Pan400 which I use all the time.

 

 

Even Ilford Pan400 has increased a lot over the years. It used to be around 19 RMB a roll, which is roughly $3 a roll. As the price of film increases, I could see this having a real negative impact on people using it. I see fewer and fewer people shooting film in China now. Even film camera prices have gone through the roof lately. A Leica M6 is around $4000 in China now. But that is to be expected I think. As film cameras age, some of them will break and there will be fewer cameras on the market but the increase in film prices is not a good sign. I often tell my friends in the west, that China is roughly 2 years ahead in trends. If something happens here, it will happen in the west around 2 years later. If film prices are exploding over here, it will most likely continue and slowly ripple through to the west as well.

 

 

To add to my frustration, out of the last two bricks of black and white film that I bought(Shanghaifilm and Fomapan400), every single roll has given me negatives with some kind of damage. Out of each roll that I shoot, I get maybe 2 images that are fine, the rest all have some kind of weird damage and not all the damage can be fixed in photoshop. In the last seven months, I haven’t had a single roll of film that wasn’t damaged. I am pretty sure it is the shipping companies right now in China. It is just a theory, but I think that the parcels that you order online are getting scanned a lot, and all the scanning is damaging the film. If you ever travel in China, you will quickly find out that you get scanned at each subway stop, at the airport, at the train station, and even at many hotels. It is not uncommon for my camera bag to go through a scanner 20 times in a single day. I usually keep my film in a lead film bag to protect it and that does work. but when you are ordering things online, they just come in a cardboard box and it has no protection. That is why I ordered the Leica Q2 Monochrom. I want to keep shooting black and white and I am tired of losing images.

 

 

I will still keep shooting film in the future because I love the process. I love how the film cameras feel in my hand, so my Nikon F2 and most likely my Seagull 4A will still get some exercise each month but I will slow down on the amount of film that I shoot.

 

 

This is the only frame out of my last roll of Shanghaifilm that was not damaged. I spent hours on the other frames, slowly photoshopping out the damage. I don’t shoot film so I can spend hours in photoshop. I hate photoshop. Thankfully the Leica Q2 Monochrome is giving me images that are very close to the type of images I get from my film cameras. I will always love black and white images and if I retire from professional shooting one day, I will most likely shoot black and white exclusively. The image below is from the Leica Q2 Monochrom. At low ISO the image is very clean but if you shoot at higher ISO then the image looks very similar to film.

 

 

 

But I am going off on a tangent here. I simply think that film prices have gone crazy. Film has become very popular over the last few years, and I have seen many photographers trying it, but if the costs keep rising the way it has been over the last 12 months, very soon film will become the sole domain of the super-wealthy and elite hipsters and the average photographer will never really discover the joys of film photography.

 

Shaun