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Comment by tartoran | Hacker News Reader

> I think it's more about signaling some cultural identity than any objective benefits of the "retro" process.

I think it could be that, or simply that people want to try a different experience. Digital photography started out as the easier, faster, and cheaper option, but the experience of using it and even the culture around photography itself has changed over time. Going back to the roots once in a while can feel refreshing. And paying for a monthly subscription is probably overkill for most casual photographers.

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> And paying for a monthly subscription is probably overkill for most casual photographers.

But film (the actual roll + development + scan) is very expensive, at least in my parts. Sure, you may mean "casual" as in "maybe shoots a roll a film a year", in which case I guess it's quite cheaper than an Adobe LR subscription. But if you shoot a roll a month or more? Then Adobe wins hands down (I'm talking the photography plan here, not the whole thing).

The cheapest stock I could find is a C-41 negative, b&w Agfa APX 400 iso, 36 pictures for 7.90 €. Color C-41 starts at 11 € with a 24 picture Kodak Ultra Max, bought as a set of 3 rolls. Developing and scanning costs 12 € for 2000x3000 px or 20 € for 4500x6700 px. That's 19.90 €, or the price of the base Adobe Photography plan.

Yes, financially doesn't make much sense to go from digital to film. Film costs, absolutely. But you end up shooting less, thinking more, waiting for the right shot and so on. You also move sliders/tweak less and mistakes teach you lessons that you quickly learn from. Sometimes there are happy accidents as well. Taking a shot becomes a deliberate action since you don't have unlimited frames. It's a different experience. Yes, the Adobe light room seems cheap in comparison to film but, that's the wrong comparison IMO. There are other tools out there that are much cheaper than Adobe's offerings if not completely free. Digital has made photography available to the masses, everybody's got a camera nowadays. However, it did kill something and what it killed is what these folk are looking for (that something that got lost in the process).

I'm not into photography anymore and will stick to cheap digital photography for convenience (smart phone) but I could see how this works out for these folks and I believe it's not just a fad or signaling. Similarly, for music, analog instruments could be replicated and enhanced digitally/electronically and yet they're what you're after sometimes.

> Taking a shot becomes a deliberate action since you don't have unlimited frames. It's a different experience.

It’s a very different experience. Whether you enjoy that depends a lot on why you are engaging in photography. Do you prize the ritual, the act of taking photographs in the moment? Then you might love film. Might also love working in a dark room and doing your own development and prints.

Personally I don’t care about any of that. I care about the resulting photo. I’ll take upwards of 800 photos when I’m shooting one of my kids’ soccer games. I’ll get 100 photos max that are worth keeping, and a much smaller number I’m really happy with. Some will miss focus. Some will miss the moment. But I’ll have a few great photos for the trouble.

There’s nothing wrong with enjoying the ritual. Also nothing wrong with just enjoying the product.

I used to do that when I was a teenager and it was truly wonderful. I had my own darkroom and was even developing my own film (BW only). As tech evolved I moved on to digital but took so many photos that somehow I stopped caring about photographs at all. It even became a bit overwhelming to look at photos and to some extent it still is to this day. I took on many other hobbies so it's not a huge loss for me. But I can totally get why some folks would get back to film from digital, they're going for the experience and not the end result as photos, which I agree would be more efficient to process digitally. But same goes with other arts. Why are people still painting? All can be done digitally in Krita or some other software and a lot more efficiently and faster and so on. And yet people pay money for canvases, oil paints, brushes, and spend hours and hours painting.

For sure. I’m not dismissing others who want that experience. It’s just not my focus when I’m taking pictures.

I do agree that going through hundreds of photos is not a process I enjoy. I’ve been trying to train myself to weed out more efficiently. The newer AI tools help some, though I still go through the AI rejects to make sure it didn’t cull something I would keep.

I also took it that the benefit of being a good photographer and not using digital is that you take less photos and may end up more efficient as a result. I could be wrong but it's cumbersome when wedding photographers share up a 7GB folder of photos with previews that are 128 pix wide, within which there are runs of photos from the same angle in their dozens which require you to full screen load a 4000+ px wide image, to see which one has the best smile or whatever. It just feels like this is too much storage and admin to me.

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