Film anybody ?

I just wondered if anybody still shoots film ?

I was so chuffed when I bought my Canon 500N 35mm SLR in the mid 90's. I still have it but never use it.

I was one of those people who slagged off digital cameras because (at the time) they were either rubbish or silly money.

The 500N was a half decent beginers camera and to this day some of my best 7X5" prints have come from that camera.

The first digital camera I bought was a Canon Ixus II and for prints it wasn't a patch on my film Canon so for 'best' shots i continued to use it.

The big change for me was when DSLR's became affordable and I've not taken a single picture with my 500N since I bought my D50 and I doubt I ever will.

If I go out for a day in the hills I'll come back with 200 pictures, delete half of them, look at 50 of them and keep 25 or so. That's just 1/8

How I'd do that with film I'll never know. £10 to buy and develop 24 pics which at 1/8 = 3 pics for £3.00.

I'm not sure if the reason I can get half decent 'digital' pictures these days is because I can experiment till my heart's content or whether it's because I can take so many that once in a while I'll get a good one.

Either way it's a shame because I love film but it's just so expensive.

That said there are some amazingly good Film SLR bargains to be had.

Are other folk the same or do people still use film ?

I have a Nikon FE sitting in the States and (as in another post) my dad has dozens of cameras so I could have any one I wanted (he keeps trying to give them to me) and the film to go with them. And an Omega enlarger etc etc. Someday I'll have his Nikon F, I suppose. I loved it, had its twin but it was stolen in the early 70s and replaced with a Minolta and then the FE.

But he says a lot of the film you can hardly get any more (try for 2-1/4 x 3-1/4 sheet or even for the roll adapter, he says) so he's almost given up.

Digital is so immediate; I think it's the way we all live now. It's sad. I took five years of photography in school (only b&w, never did my own colour) and I love the process and the whole diy printing thing, the hours in the darkroom, stuff hanging all over the place, the smell. But it's of another era, sadly, like so many other things.

I have salvaged my old lenses, though, all Nikkor, and one or two are AF and the rest I'll have converted. So I like to think that's something, even if it's not film, to take with me into the brave new era.

I have a lovely Voigtlander sitting upstairs gathering dust ..I just can't justify the expense of buying film and wasting pics ..I love digital

I occasionally take some shots with my Dad's Pentax ME Super. It's a good camera, and I do love film sometimes, but the ease of digital just makes me prefer it.