At the end of 2024, I had a brief but cathartic flirtation with film photography again. There was a very personal reason for this, when my father passed away, he left an old Minolta X300. This was the same camera model that I had used in my early days of photography.
I wanted to celebrate his memory by running some film through the camera. It became quite the emotional journey and indeed, I wrote about the experience here on Light Stalking.
However, beyond the emotional journey, I want to share with you what I learnt from a technical and creative viewpoint, in my brief flirtation with film.
I should preface this by saying that I had shot film before, in fact if you have followed my articles here, you will know that much of my early photographic career was film based. However, it has been at least 20 years since I had shot a roll of film, and so this is more about what I had forgotten than new things that I learned.
Every Shot Has A Value
This is something that has always been the case when shooting film. Every single image you make is going to cost you. There is the purchase price of the film, the cost of development and the price of printing to factor in.
That was not an inconsiderable sum in the pre-digital days, but these days, it is a highly significant amount. To get from film to contact sheet you are looking at around $30 per roll of 36. Quite a bit more if you decide to get prints made.
However, this is not necessarily a negative. It teaches you that every single exposure you make has a value. That in turn slows you down. It makes you think both creatively and technically every time you press the shutter. It’s a sobering counter to the digital concept of spray and pray.
Exposure Is Important
Modern digital cameras are incredible. Even if somehow you manage to get the exposure completely wrong, you can pull it back into something decent. This is not so with shooting film.
Most film has a much lower latitude to exposure mistakes than digital. There are one or two black and white films that get close, but in general if you make a significant exposure mistake on film, there is little to no chance of pulling it back either as a print or as a scan.
When I shot Ilford HP4 on my father’s camera, I bracketed, much like I do on digital. However, the images that were 1 or more stops over or under exposed were significantly degraded compared to a digital equivalent.
That also leads to a big increase in something else we don’t worry too much about in digital – grain aka noise.
The upshot of this is that you become keenly aware of how important exposure is to getting the optimum image. This is made even more important by the lack of exposure tools available to you. Speaking of which…
Trusting Your Eyes and Instincts.
The Minolta X300 is a very basic film camera. It has manual and aperture priority exposure modes, and that’s about it. The viewfinder has a +/- scale for exposure and split/Fresnel screen for focusing. Yes, that means manual focusing.
That viewfinder is also really quite dark compared to any modern DSLR or mirrorless. This all combines to make taking photos with the X300 quite challenging.
For focusing, I find the split screen the easiest to use. However, you have to center the camera on your focal point, focus then recompose the shot. There is none of this guiding a focus point using a joystick or d-pad.
Like with exposure however, it slows you down, makes you think clearly about where exactly your subject/focus should be.
There is a complete lack of aids on older film cameras. No histograms, no live views, no focus peaking, none of the tools we are used to. That means you need to visualise in your head exactly how you want the image to look and then use your own experience with that camera and film type to make the vision a reality. Experience is the keyword here, as it trains you to understand so many elements of photography that we often take for granted.
ISO and White Balance Are Fixed
Want to shoot something inside, handheld? You cannot just bump up the ISO and get on with it. You will need to swap out the film for one of a higher ISO.
That’s not necessarily the end of the story. If you are going inside to shoot, you will probably be shooting under artificial light. It’s not as simple as putting a higher ISO film in. You need a film that’s colour balance is tuned to interior lights, in general tungsten film. Without it, your images are going to have a deep orange cast.
It is perfectly possible to remove films mid-roll, however, you will lose a few frames of that film (every frame costs) and you need to be meticulous with labelling. If you remove a film with 20 exposures shot, you need to label that film well. Then when you come to use the film again you need to shoot with the lens cap on and wind on at least 24 frames, before you can start shooting again. Again it’s a game of patience and planning.
Shooting with film brought back a lot of memories, some good, some bad. There is no doubt that we have lost some important skillsets in the move to digital. The most significant is perhaps building up an instinct that when you press the shutter button, you have got it right. In a digital world, that instinct is much diminished because we can review the image before and after we take it.
More importantly, perhaps, is that shooting film teaches you to slow down and think about every shot that you take. You become keenly aware that every image has value.
Would I like to go back to film permanently? That’s a resounding no. The convenience and image quality of digital far outweigh the educational aspect of film. However, as an occasional cathartic exercise in creativity it’s nice to know that I can still take my father’s camera for a run out.