https://www.wymt.com/content/news/It-wa ... GIQQ-E4MVY

Paul's a great guy. I've put many a roll through his processor. Our wives were High-School BFFs. I'm glad he stayed with it as long as he did.

All of the labs that I worked for are closed. An entire career denied to me.

There's a place like that down the road from me.

The deathwatch continues.

Damn that Tim Apple and the iPhone

sad tho.. i always enjoyed the fact that the less you knew about photography, the more expensive your end results were.
for me it was like Name That Tune..... I can capture that shot with only one roll of film...
or did that once in a lifetime shot leave a valid image in your camera.... news at 11.

Kanton DX35 is a Concept Machine for Easy At-Home Film Processing



Really just a daylight loading tank with a processing computer/timer in the base.

The real challenge would be finding the chems.

It's great that the guy was able to retire. He obviously had photo-chemicals in his blood stream.
There is a good market for of digital photo printing and enlarging even if the film side of it dwindles. I don't rely on the film side for my business but it's nice to have.

I'm still growing the film side though. April 2019 was 15% over April 2018 which was 6% over 2017 which was 5% over 2016. It's just going up and up year-on-year for me. Since 2016 there have been no months lower than the previous year's. How long this will continue is anyone's guess, but I'll take it.

sometimes just sitting around and looking at a stack of photographs can be rewarding. not a print on a sheet of paper... but an acutal photo on good quality photo paper.
technically.. you can do the same digitally...

but i remember this roll shot in such and such.... and that roll shot there.

Quote:

“Technology has taken over. I tell people I'm a pilot and do aerial photography in the helicopter and I've been replaced with a drone and a phone,” Gordon added.

i miss film, i really do ... but i honestly can't imagine going back

TOS posted:

i miss film, i really do ... but i honestly can't imagine going back

Agreed. Even after I got permission to use the B&W darkroom at the community college, I could never book a time I could actually be there.
What I miss is the camera controls. F-stop ring, match needle, ground glass and split screen. Who ever said, "Turning the camera into a computer will make it easier to use and give you more options" was an idiot.

I think some of this is nostalgia, but there is one area where film still outperforms digital, and that is low light performance. Eventually even that will cease to be an issue, and arguably we are there at the high end. Canon did a short with a DSLR at night and it was amazing.

DukeofNuke posted:

Quote:

“Technology has taken over. I tell people I'm a pilot and do aerial photography in the helicopter and I've been replaced with a drone and a phone,” Gordon added.

Sounds good to me. Safer and less wasteful.

DukeofNuke posted:

TOS posted:

i miss film, i really do ... but i honestly can't imagine going back

Agreed. Even after I got permission to use the B&W darkroom at the community college, I could never book a time I could actually be there.
What I miss is the camera controls. F-stop ring, match needle, ground glass and split screen. Who ever said, "Turning the camera into a computer will make it easier to use and give you more options" was an idiot.

oh, i dunno .. i have my dslr set to manual everything, including manual focus, and it still feels very much like my old film camera

i think the only difference is adjusting f-stop, which is done with a couple of buttons and a thumbwheel, plus i guess the iso setting

TOS posted:

DukeofNuke posted:

TOS posted:

i miss film, i really do ... but i honestly can't imagine going back

Agreed. Even after I got permission to use the B&W darkroom at the community college, I could never book a time I could actually be there.
What I miss is the camera controls. F-stop ring, match needle, ground glass and split screen. Who ever said, "Turning the camera into a computer will make it easier to use and give you more options" was an idiot.

oh, i dunno .. i have my dslr set to manual everything, including manual focus, and it still feels very much like my old film camera

i think the only difference is adjusting f-stop, which is done with a couple of buttons and a thumbwheel, plus i guess the iso setting

My wife does the same thing. She likes the immediate feedback of the screen on the back of the DSLR. Much less guessing as to the result.

maurvir posted:

I think some of this is nostalgia, but there is one area where film still outperforms digital, and that is low light performance. Eventually even that will cease to be an issue, and arguably we are there at the high end. Canon did a short with a DSLR at night and it was amazing.

Film is dramatically inferior to digital in low light. Back when I had a full frame Nikon D700, I could easily shoot at ISO 1600 and get results that were sharper and less grainy than ISO 400 film. And this was seven years ago.

The thing that I like most about film is exactly that you can’t see the results immediately. Each shot requires a decision on exposure to be made carefully. You can’t just chimp your shots and make corrections immediately

Oh, the pros LOVE being able to see their shots right after they take them. I used to "chimp" shots all the time with to make sure I got something.

user posted:

Oh, the pros LOVE being able to see their shots right after they take them. I used to "chimp" shots all the time with to make sure I got something.

I suppose that's 6he difference between a professional photographer and an artist photographer?

If an artist is smart, they make sure they got the shot, too.

I agree. But the way photos are made, digitally vs film, is a much different aesthetic. One is not inherently better than the other, but they are significantly different. I barely shoot film any longer, but it still happens from time to time. There is a film called Cinestill that I want to try.

I used some single-use cameras in A'stan. I posted some of those shots but mostly I used digital. I did not edit on the fly though because there was no time to sit and go through the pictures in the camera. The cameras I used were returned to the combat photographers along with the memory cards. I might as well have been using film.

Almost all film I develop for customers goes through a digitising process before presentation, whether they get prints on real light sensitive photographic paper, or files. There's something about the act of using a film camera which satisfies a desire to interact with the old technology.

Also, I just noticed the title of the thread shows "potographers".

Ribtor posted:

Also, I just noticed the title of the thread shows "potographers".

Intrest technically not wrong... just not the norm.

Yeah, yeah. Typos aboound. sosume.

please note the position of typo king is already taken, and par has no plans to retire

I expect mechanical watches to make a comeback.
Maybe audio cassettes.
Fine fountain pens might also see a growing market.

Vinyl phonograph albums are a growth industry.

Ribtor posted:

I expect mechanical watches to make a comeback.
Maybe audio cassettes.
Fine fountain pens might also see a growing market.

Mechanical watches and fountain pens never left. Pray audio cassettes remain dead, however.

maurvir posted:

Ribtor posted:

I expect mechanical watches to make a comeback.
Maybe audio cassettes.
Fine fountain pens might also see a growing market.

Mechanical watches and fountain pens never left. Pray audio cassettes remain dead, however.

Okay, what do we keep telling you about prayer?

https://louderthanwar.com/are-tapes-rea ... -comeback/

Seems like it's more for pure nostalgia than any misguided idiocy about sounding better, but they're still increasing in popularity.

dv posted:

maurvir posted:

Ribtor posted:

I expect mechanical watches to make a comeback.
Maybe audio cassettes.
Fine fountain pens might also see a growing market.

Mechanical watches and fountain pens never left. Pray audio cassettes remain dead, however.

Okay, what do we keep telling you about prayer?

https://louderthanwar.com/are-tapes-rea ... -comeback/

Seems like it's more for pure nostalgia than any misguided idiocy about sounding better, but they're still increasing in popularity.

Anyone who misses cassette tapes very likely never really used them and are suffering from nostalgia derangement syndrome. The only thing tapes were good for were mix tapes you could share with friends, something you can replicate much more easily digitally.

maurvir posted:

dv posted:

maurvir posted:

Ribtor posted:

I expect mechanical watches to make a comeback.
Maybe audio cassettes.
Fine fountain pens might also see a growing market.

Mechanical watches and fountain pens never left. Pray audio cassettes remain dead, however.

Okay, what do we keep telling you about prayer?

https://louderthanwar.com/are-tapes-rea ... -comeback/

Seems like it's more for pure nostalgia than any misguided idiocy about sounding better, but they're still increasing in popularity.

Anyone who misses cassette tapes very likely never really used them and are suffering from nostalgia derangement syndrome. The only thing tapes were good for were mix tapes you could share with friends, something you can replicate much more easily digitally.

I was the king of mixtapes, THE KING!

It was an art. A carefully crafted art.

And the you got to give a physical, tangible, thing. And it was appreciated.

I guess you could do it with CDs

What do they do these days? send a spotify playlist on snapchat?

Oh, I remember making mix tapes. I had boxes of them and I would rotate them in the car or lend them to friends. I mastered making mix tapes, making sure the average sound level was right, there was a gap between tracks, etc. I even wrote correct labels for them.

I do not miss those days at all. Now if I want to send someone a mix, I will either send a CD or a folder of tracks on a thumb drive.

I was also the Master of Mix ...

ON 8-TRACK, uncouth individuals !!!



My deck was exactly this model.

I often play my old mix tapes at work. Most date from the 80s. Right now I have Warren Zevon's Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner blasting from a Realistic 60 minute tape I would have made in the late 70s.

The TDKs have held up the best over the decades. They seem to be made to a high mechanical standard. The Memorex have not fared as well and the BASFs are the worst except for the BASF Ferrochrome III formulation which seem up to TDK standards.

When I had my VCR repair business in the 80s, BASF tapes would shed oxide particles so badly that little piles of the stuff would form under certain static guide pins. And forget about the heads; they could clog after a few minutes of play. Terrible tapes.

ukimalefu posted:

I was the king of mixtapes, THE KING!

It was an art. A carefully crafted art.

And the you got to give a physical, tangible, thing. And it was appreciated.

I guess you could do it with CDs

What do they do these days? send a spotify playlist on snapchat?

Yes. Gauging whether the last song would fit on a side was work of craftsmanship; did you have to fade out the last few seconds or would it just make it before the leader...

This makes me want to dig out my old tapes and see how they have held up.

juice posted:

This makes me want to dig out my old tapes and see how they have held up.

The last time I tried that ended in disaster. I did get to relive respooling the tape with a pencil, though.

My tape deck no longer rewinds.

Flip the tape and fast forward?

juice posted:

Flip the tape and fast forward?

Audio cassettes aren't that bad. With some fresh belts, a clean pinch roller and idler, a de-magnetiser and a small screwdriver to align the head you should be good to go.

Car players were human waste, though. Cassettes and a hot, dusty car interior were a bad combination.

i keep reading that word in the title as "pornographers"