When I moved to Digital I bought all Canon dSLR gear and left my Minolta film SLR gear behind. Every so often I would dig out my first SLR (Olympus OM-1) to shoot a few slides to help keep the local camera club slide competition going. It was fun, shoot a roll, toss it in the mail and within a week I had slides. Neat.
I'm traveling to AZ in a month to photograph slot canyons. Boy would slides really be great to capture when out there.. But I really would hate to carry Canon *AND* Olympus gear out there, especially since the Canyon we're going to is a trek off the beaten path. What if I had a camera that fit the lenses I'm already taking out there?
So I looked up pricing on a Canon Elan IIe - something that would fit all of my EOS EF lenses. $43 for the camera and a grip that takes AA batteries (and therefore don't have to waste money on those funky expensive disposable batteries).
The Camera comes in and all I had was an old unopened roll of Ilford FP4 125asa - 24 exposures.
I had so much fun with the film camera, perhaps mostly due to the fact that the film SLR is a 'full frame' 35mm camera and my 20 and 50d's are all cropped sensor. My Fisheye was round, my tilt-shift was shifty and my 50mm 1.4 was even more razor sharp than ever.
Over the weekend I tracked down everything to develop black and white again. I had forgotten how much fun darkroom work was. For less than $100 including the camera I bought all new darkroom materials, fresh chemicals and had a roll developed in no time. Took the strip to my local lab and they drum scanned it to a disc.
The point to this story, if there is one.. While Digital is king, film is fun. The journey between tripping the shutter and seeing the print used to be quite the process. The suspense of making a light sensative strip of film into a transparent negative is a nail biter. Compared to digital, sure it's expensive but consider it entertainment. Pulling the strip from your holder and hanging it to dry is the grown up equivalent of presents at Christmas - you know you can't touch the stuff but you want to see every frame.
So - the question is, who else still gets into the darkroom every now and then?
And the statement is - if you have an old film camera laying around, and chances are that you do - for under $50 in developing materials and chemicals you have a magical, old-timey world in film waiting for those who think they would enjoy it - but not everyone does.
