Younger film users?

[Roger Hicks]

Several manufacturers, importers, etc., told me the same thing at photokina: that they're seeing more and more younger people looking at film cameras, buying film, etc.

Of course the people I was talking to were a self-selecting sample, but given that each of them said it separately -- LF manufacturers, enlarger makers, film sellers and more -- there may be something in it. As one said, "Young photographers have grown up with digital. Film is something new to them -- something different from their everyday lives, and less time in front of a computer screen."

Cheers,

R.

[EcoLeica]

I guess I'm what you are calling young at the tender age of 23! I used film during highschool, just before digital SLRs became affordable to everyday people. Even though i have grown up in the digital revolution, I love using film! i guess its mostly the excitement I get waiting for the negative to be developed, something digital never gave me. All i can say is thank god for kodak and all the other film companies still pumping out the sweet sweet film!

[maddoc]

As I have written elsewhere recently ... 40 young people (most of them students of my university) on the waiting list of a small local photo-shop here in Sapporo for the Olympus Pen F ....

[infrequent]

another youngish film user. there are plenty like me.

[EcoLeica]

Geeze! now that brings some hope to my luddite heart! Even in NZ almost every young person who does photography wants to know about holgas!

[projectbluebird]

Originally Posted by EcoLeica

Geeze! now that brings some hope to my luddite heart! Even in NZ almost every young person who does photography wants to know about holgas!

Holgas may be the antithesis of most rangefinders, but they still take film!
There are many of us youngsters out there, I'll use film until I can't get it anymore. And even then, I'll try my hand at making it. I already mix my own chemicals for development.

Film ain't dead.

[sojournerphoto]

I started off shooting film at the age about 7 - many years ago. Then life made output difficult and so I didn't do much photography as there was no real joy in shooting pics that I couldn't print myself. Having a family and starting to shoot digital were a real renaissance for me and I fell in love with making pictures all over again. I've now started shooting film again alongside the digital kit and realised that the difference for me is that digital (and a better job) has made the output stage doable again. Whilst it's true that a large format printer takes up the same amount of room as a darkroom can, I used to spend a long time getting silver prints how I wanted and the sessions had to be long. Now I can do a bit and then brak off and do abit etc.

So digital has freed me to make pictures again - but mostly via the printing stage. It's taken me a while to realise this so I now have both digital and analogue cameras.

Mike

[steamer]

In Tokyo there are a lot of youngsters adorned with film cameras, maybe it's a fashion thing. Frankly I think one looks like a dork street shooting with a big plastic digicam with a foot-long lens, but then what would I know. The micro 4/3 thing might exert a powerful call with it's smaller body and lens size. Still there's something awfully satisfying about film and film cameras

[Sorekara]

When I got interested in photography in college, I started with film since there was no way I could afford a decent digital camera at the time. I tried digital once I graduated and found a job, but now, in my mid-20s, I've gone back to film. It has the look, it has the feel. Both of my sisters (who are younger than I am) are also now using film cameras.

And like an earlier poster mentioned, here in Tokyo there seem to be lots of young people with film cameras. There may be a slight bias from the parts of town I usually hang out in, but I often see young people with old film SLRs, TLRs, and even rangefinders dangling from their shoulders. It's a great sight!

[feenej]

My daughter and her high-school chums are taking a film class right now. I set one of her friends up with a recently CLA'ed and re-covered Minolta XG-1, afer her Mom's Minolta XD-5 broke down. Another one of her chums came in, and I tried to set her up with a Minolta SRT, called "the perfect student camera" by Karen Nakamura (on Photoethnicity). She did not like that, so I showed her several other cameras, including fully automated point-and-shoots. She went home without taking anything.

[Roger Hicks]

Thanks everyone! Keep 'em coming!

'Young' in this context does indeed mean 'under 40 or even 50'. Keith Canham said that whereas at photokina 2004 the majority of people he saw were at least 50, it's now more like even numbers for over 50 and under 30.

I don't want to to Pollyana-ish, but at least it's worth talking about some good news for once.

Oh: and we came back from the show with a couple of review rolls of Ektar 100, and there's another brick of it on the way. Kodak did two (well attended) open meetings called 'What's Film Got to Do With It' and there are still real film enthusiasts in the Big Yellow Jelly.

Cheers,

R.

[Toby]

I think as digital matures it is gaining its own aesthetic which as time goes on is becoming more and more separate from the aesthetics of film photography in general and black and white photography in particular. Perhaps just as in the 19th century when painting was in some senses liberated from the literal depiction of subjects by photography, so in turn film photography will gain new life as it too is liberated from depicting the hum drum mainstream in our media by digital.

It is this 'separateness' from digital which is enticing the young

[Spyderman]

I'm 24 now. Started 6 years ago, when dSLRs were expensive and dP&S crappy. When I think about it for a while, the dSLRs are still expensive and dP&S still crappy. So I keep using film. In 2007 I went completely B&W, in 2008 I started to develop myself and roll my own film from bulk rolls.

PS: I have to say that I've owned a Canon G3 since about 3 years, and I recently got an EOS D30 (not 30D!), but B&W film and RF camera are more fun. I guess it has to do with the instant gratification thing...

[Al Kaplan]

Here in the Miami, Florida area all the colleges are teaching film based photography, and scheduling darkroom time seems to be a major problem. I've let a number of them use my darkroom over the past couple of years. Students notice that I'm carrying film cameras and most of them seem to recognize a Leica when they see it. My next step is to try to find one who'd be willing to trade teaching me a little more about scanning in exchange for some darkroom time and maybe some lessons too.

[Sorekara]

Originally Posted by Toby

It is this 'separateness' from digital which is enticing the young

I think this is certainly a big part of it. It probably has a lot to do with the popularity in particular of things like Holgas, color cross-processing, etc. In fact it's pretty easy for these things to become easy signifiers or badges for hipsterness (for example), but that's something many 'alternative' art media have to deal with.

[mcgrattan]

I was in Prague earlier in the summer and noticed that a lot of the younger Japanese tourists were carrying film cameras. Often quite nice stuff -- classic SLRs, Hexar AFs, Contax T3s, that sort of thing. I didn't spot any rangefinders, though.

Sitting by the river late one night a succession of girls -- part of a tour party, or a bunch of friends, maybe -- stopped in front of us to take photos of one of the bridges, and of the five or six who stopped to take photos, more than half were shooting film slrs. These weren't recent EOS or Nikon models. They were classic compact chrome and black 1960s/1970s style things. Olympus OMs, Canon AE, Pentaxes, that sort of thing.

I've not noticed this quite so much in Oxford, but I think I tune the tourists out more here.

[elshaneo]

Well my friends, at RMIT University, most of us, young photography students, still use films with 35mm format, medium format and also large format cameras.

Have a great look at this website:

http://www.danieltuckmantel.com/

and check the Still-Life photo gallery section, all of the shots were done on films using 4x5 Plaubel Large format cameras.

Best Regards
Shane Lam

[mcgrattan]

I think the hispter thing is real, but I wonder if that was why I saw so many classic compact SLRs being carried? I wouldn't have thought they had much hipster caché.

Nice, functional cameras, of course. With good lenses. But not really grungy enough to be hip.

I wonder if people are buying dSLRS and then being encouraged to go out and buy film SLRs with compatible lens mounts?

[Al Kaplan]

Compatible lens mounts would make good sense on a typical student's budget.

[Ronald_H]

Welll, I'm 37, so I qualify as 'young' here

I do use film in ever increasing quantities. Eleborated on that in many posts, but in brief: It challenges me and it is fun. Besides, the dynamic range of film still trounces digital. Tri-X I love you.

Two young (early twenties) friends who have gotten the photography bug are shooting with film too. One as part of a course on photography, the other one besides digital after she found her father's Spotmatic. She looks dead sexy with it too

I have to admit I see mostly older people (older as in 'above 40') at swap meets, but film is somehow percieved as 'cool', even by the youngsters.

And something that gladdens my heart: Friends have a young son. One day I was visiting and managed to squeeze of some shots of the little boy with his daddy. Used an old Nikon. Near expired and frankly cr*ppy slide film in there. Not too briljant, but after some massaging in Photoshop and B/W conversion it really was a cute pic.

For the youngster's first birthday, the parents had a mosaique made of the thousands of (digital) pics they made his first year. You know the kind, up close you see individual pics, from further away you see 'the big picture'. Guess what 'big picture' they had chosen...

[Sorekara]

Perhaps classic SLR use hasn't been as blatantly hipsterized as lomography has, but I think there is a funky/retro type of appeal there. Nice cameras with lenses are often available for shockingly low prices, next to nothing really. That makes them more accessible, and might also add a bit of thrift store chic to them. I certainly know people who would commonly classified as hipsters that have gone this route.

[Muggins]

I've not noticed it either - though I keep an eye out for odd cameras. The oddest so far was probably the black Polaroid SX-70 at St Giles Fair - the lass using it was very nice over me making a prat of myself by not recognising it! In my defence, I'd only ever seen pictures of the silver version, so the black one was completely new to me.

You do see the odd person, though. There was a chap with an FM2 at Cropredy this year, I ran into two Spanish tourists at the Sheldonian sporting an OM10, good conversation starter as I was carrying mine as well, and I chatted with a chap with a Contaflex last week. One half od the spaniards, and the young lady with the SX-70, would definitely count as young, and I saw a lass of about 20 on May morning using a Kiev she'd bought in Oxfam a week or two before. So they are out there! Chat to the next one you see - it might be me, especially if I'm using a box camera. But I'm probably not that young anymore...

Adrian

Originally Posted by mcgrattan

Sitting by the river late one night a succession of girls -- part of a tour party, or a bunch of friends, maybe -- stopped in front of us to take photos of one of the bridges, and of the five or six who stopped to take photos, more than half were shooting film slrs. These weren't recent EOS or Nikon models. They were classic compact chrome and black 1960s/1970s style things. Olympus OMs, Canon AE, Pentaxes, that sort of thing.

I've not noticed this quite so much in Oxford, but I think I tune the tourists out more here.

[Gaspar]

I am 32 and started with digital which I still use, but increasingly I shoot film, Now there are many reasons for this. First film equipment is dead cheap and well built. Second, film slrs are a lot more compact than dslrs. As much as I like my D200, it is huge and heavy and I can get same or better quality with an om-10. Third- DOF apart from ultra expensive full frame DSLRs you can get much bette out of focus effects on film and wide angle lenses are a lot more distortion free I feel.
Last I don't think anything beats the colour rendition of Kodak Portra and the portraits I shoot in this film are in my opinion light years ahead on what I get on the D200.
As for film being hip, that doesn't really come into my equation.

[gnarayan]

I'm 25. I like the look. I prefer the generally smaller and less conspicuous cameras and faster lenses. In some situations I prefer them for their simplicity. I use both. Scanning film takes longer than editing RAW files and still doesn't look as good as the prints. If I want prints I usually shoot digital.

Cheers,
-Gautham

[stuken]

Being in the unique position of being an Instructor at one Art School (for kids 2-18) and a student at Emily Carr university I see two major reasons for young people liking film. One, the hipsters/scenesters/lomography crowd. Their alternative life style revolves around vintage, so there is a large, and growing, popularity to shoot classic SLRs ect. My students, who range from 9-18, all love the process of the darkroom, and seeing their prints come to life.

For me, I enjoy the work flow of film. I also enjoy film cameras, they're much more enjoyable to use than my DSLR. I also shoot alot of medium and large format, a process that I can't copy digitally, and I dont have 40,000 dollars lying around to drop on a Hd3 or the like.

All that said, digital has its place. When I'm shooting jobs I rarely use film. The process of digital lends it self very nicely to most forms of professional photography.

Oh yeah, I'm 21, been shooting for 7 years.