Is anyone still shooting black & white film? I know that when I got my digital camera, I stopped shooting film altogether. I like the convenience and price of shooting digital. For the youngsters out there who never had to deal with film at all, it used to cost me $15.00 or more to get processing, prints, and CD burns of my film. That's 36 pictures for $15.00. It's also hard to beat the instant gratification of digital, instantly checking the shot on the little LCD, and if I really want to know how the picture turned out I can upload immediately to my computer and see in large format how the picture looks. With film you send your pictures to a lab and wait a week or two before you see anything. You could go to a local 1-hour lab and get marginal quality prints and (usually) severely scratched negatives, which often show up on the prints themselves.
There are drawbacks to digital as well. Laziness. My digital camera is a "point & shoot" and that's often what I do - point and shoot. With the luxury of almost unlimited pictures at virtually zero cost (I use rechargeable batteries), I take lots of pictures but I don't concentrate as much on getting good shots, just hoping that some of them turn out OK. Then there are the prints, which used to come automatically with film processing, regardless of the quality of the image. Now that I can pick and choose which pictures are good enough to print, I usually decide that NONE of them are worth printing. As a result, I have a lot of framed pictures around the house of my kids, all taken from birth to about 3 years of age, at which point I got the digital camera and stopped making prints, so no framed pictures of the 4-7 year old range.
Which brings me around to the topic of this post. I've grown a bit tired of the digital camera. One of the interesting aspects of film photography is the different qualities of color, contrast, saturation, etc. offered by different films. That's all gone, for the most part, with digital. Then there's black & white. It is certainly possible to remove the color from a color picture and have a B&W picture. My camera even has a setting for B&W so you can take B&W straight from the camera. I haven't been impressed with the results and the quality of the digital prints is pretty low. So I pulled out the old film camera yesterday and dusted it off went out and shot some B&W film. Today I was looking for the website of the lab where I used to send my B&W film, San Miguel Photo Labs, and it looks like hard times for the industry, to say the least. They've gone from a staff of about 9 to a staff of 2 - the owner and a part-time assistant. Some of their machines are obsolete and they can no longer get parts for repair, so they no longer offer proofs. Then there's the warning signs about B&W papers:
Kodak has stopped making B&W papers. Agfa is gone from the face of the earth. Ilford just announced that it will not be selling its own B&W materials in the USA, but rather, has turned that function over to a third party. It is scary times for all of us in the B&W photo world. So I am here to tell you: THE SHIP IS NOT SINKING. We did, however, take those little canvas covers off of the life boats....
How much longer will they be able to stay in business at all? I can process film myself - it's a wonderfully "magical" process that I learned in high school while working on the yearbook staff. I loved the darkroom and even set one up in my old school a few years ago, developed films there and even made some prints from an enlarger we got for a good price back then. I've got materials here at home for developing just the film, but it's a time consuming process and unless you do it on a regular basis it's hard to keep the chemicals fresh, so I don't really want to go there again until I decide to teach the kids how to do it. Who knows if film itself will even be available at a reasonable cost by then?
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