The Economics of Shooting Film
I enjoy shooting film, but am also a cheapskate.
Film
| Yashica Electro 35 GSN | $60-70 on eBay |
| Fujifilm Fujicolor Superia 400 | $2.15 |
| Developing (Penn Camera) | $4.00 |
| $0.17 c/exp |
Digital
| Canon T1i | $700 |
| 4GB Kingston SD Card | $8.09 |
| Developing | $0 |
So, what kind of conclusion can be drawn about shooting film? The overhead costs – the cost of a good film camera, the cost of film – start low and eventually, of course, increase above the level of shooting film, since there’s no explicit cost to shooting a frame of digital film. However, this point at which digital becomes more expensive actually lies at a level that’s quite a bit higher than the average number of photos taken in a few years. As one point of comparison, my Flickr account, which I’ve used since 2003, contains 2,121 photos. Despite being what I’d term a pretty avid user of the site, I still haven’t taken enough photos to make a digital camera ‘less expensive’ than film.
As far as arguing for specific advantages of film over digital, I’ll defer to Ken Rockwell’s Real Raw argument and also to the less-objective fact that I find it more motivating to shoot 24 photos on a roll rather than theoretically infinite photos. Enumerated goals are more likely to be fulfilled, in my case, than infinite ones.
$708.09 / $0.1708 = 4145.72 exposures
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