I'm certainly still going to get a digital camera,because of the benefits of multiple shots and instant shot analysis etc...
I'm going to start here... it's a contentious topic, but widgetal suffers an awful lot from the 'legacy' of film. For twenty five years, the pioneers of digital have been trying to do with the digital capture medium what was always possible with opto--chemistry and physical mechanics; For most of that time, then, Widgetal has been playing catch up, trying 'just' to match the capabilities of 'film', let alone do anything better, or do anything 'new' film couldn't.
Multiple shots? Instant analysis? The 1879 Kodak Box-Brownie, that exploited the new technology of celluloid 'film' to offer an over the counter 'consumer friendly' camera, that alleviated the photographer from the hassle of preparing wet glass plates, took 100 frames per roll! While winder equipped SLR of old could fire them as fast as a modern DSLR! The Lands Polaroid camera first marketed as a commercial consumer 'instant picture' camera, went on sale in the USA in the 1940's! These are not exactly 'novelties' provided by widgetal!
Are many of you in possession of a similar camera,and what are the costs these days with film?
So, moving on.... the costs... immutable laws of entropy and the universe; Clutter expands to fill the space available; Work, expands to take up the time available; Expenditure expands to consume the funds available!!!! Like ANY hobby interest photography will absorb as much of your money as you let it... and then bid for a bit more!
Economic debate between Widgetal and film, is a bit apples and oranges; but the notion that film costs and digital is cheap, is a simplification tending to utter fallacy.
Amusing anecdote: About ten years ago, my Auntie bought my gran a little Digi-Compact to take photo's of the great grand-kids, and got her all enthusiastic showing her it shot Video, like she used to shoot Super 8 Cine film, when my Aunte was a toddler. Gran spent about an hour playing with it, then handed it back to Auntie and said "OK, so how do I get the photo's out of it?"... Auntie looked around and then came to an abrupt halt... "Ah!" she said "You don't have a computer, do you?"
Which is to exemplify the main difference between Film & Digital; and the ONE thing that 'digital photography' has opened the door on. Film used to make PICTURES; you held them, looked at them, put them in a frame or an album; job done. Digital makes DATA... you cant see it, hold it, stick it on the mantelpiece; The digital camera is dependent on the rest of the digital infrastructure to turn that data into something you can look at... does make it easy to store it, copy it, transmit it, display it, publish it, whatever, BUT, you are making DATA not PICTURES.....
So, COSTS... Hand my Gran a disposable film camera from the petrol station; cost maybe £5, take it to boots, and for another £5, they handed her a packet of PICTURES, she could hold, and look at, and hide in a draw! Cost very little and depended on almost nothing else.
Hand her a Digital camera, cost maybe £80... and unless she was happy to look at postage stamp sized display on the back, and buy new SD cards every time she wanted to take photo's, instead of a new roll of film, she also needed to buy a computer, and, when she ran out of hard drive space, CD's to store the 'data files' or more hard drives; and IF she wanted to male a 'picture' a printer, and paper and ink...... and all of a sudden, this 'idea' that digital is 'cheap' is starting to fall down.
Over 20 years I built up a pretty useful 'kit' of film cameras. In Y2K, having been early into 'Digital', at least as far as the 'Digital Dark-Room', where the 'virtual' processing saved an awful lot of mess, materials and money compared t my conventional dark-room; I looked at 'Direct Digital' cameras; which concluded with me buying a high-end dedicated film scanner, and sticking to my 35mm SLR's! Cost of early digitals was exorbitant, and the quality pretty dire. It's only been in the last five years, the cost/quality of digital SLR's have got close enough to tempt me to buy one... and £2K or so the poorer to get close to the capability I had with my 35mm film SLR's... and further conclusion that £2Kwould have bought a LOT of film!
Down to the nitty gritty, You can get film, like Poudland Agfa for £1 a roll; straight develop only at ASDA, is about £2, £3 if you get then scanned to digital; about £6 if you get the prints made.
I tend to only get ASDA to do a straight dev, and home scan; as it's cheaper and more convenient than doing them at home.
Better film, tends to be around a fiver a roll, and commercial processing can be around £10 time, which can start to be a bit painful on the wallet. But, if you want to do B&W home processing is still reasonably 'cheap', and you 'might' do C41 colour negatives for a bit less than ASA charge if you batch up films to make the most of your chemicals. E6 slide film, I used to shoot, as it was traditionally the cheapest to home develop, isn't any more!
E6 slide, was the economical answer, as you view the original film in a viewer or on projection, so only cost was just developing the film, and maybe mounting the slides for projector carousels. Home printing, was never really 'cheap'. Overheads for enlarger and developing equipment put to one side; paper and chemicals, never made it all that competitive compared to commercial printing; B&W was often more expensive over the counter and cheaper at home, so offered more chance to be cheaper than DIY-ing colour, but most of any savings that were to be found were simply from cherry-picking frames to print, rather than printing every frame from a roll, and were usually lost after, printing larger than you'd get commercial prints.
So matters remain much as they always were, and the persuit will consume as much time and money and space as you let it really.
Interesting reading a couple of the comments above suggesting how film makes you slow down, be more considerate, more disciplined, more discerning and discriminatory..... actually gave me flash backs twenty years, to when that was said about black and white photography, prime lens photography, older fully manual clock-work cameras, and medium format! It's the same old arguments, for 'older' technology applied to a newer one!
And I will say that there is both truth ad merit in them! Only twenty years ago, it was advocating what I termed 'slow photo', using all prime 'outfits' or range finder cameras, or medium format cameras with fixed lenses and no in-built light meters, as opposed to 'fast photo' which employed automated, winder equipped cameras you could use pretty much like a modern widgetal and 'Spray & Pray' or machine gun with. And I did both!
On which score, the electrc-pcture-maker, has pretty much supplanted the 'fast-foto' 'automatic exposure' winder equipped SLR's I used, as general purpose cameras, and did exploit at rock gigs or shooting events or motorsport, where convenience and speed and grabbing the moment were more important than faffing and fiddling and being diligent and disciplined. But, Slo-Foto cameras remain, and a few of them even get a reasonable amount of use.
As has been said, it's a separate discipline or hobby to a large degree... and back to the £2K's worth of electric picture maker vs the film it would have bought; in my own career, until bought the DSLR, that fast photo 'convenience' had largely been fulfilled with a compact digital camera, that offered the pocketablity of my 35mm'pocket' camera, with a chunk of SLR versatility in a 28-70 'equivilent' lens and WYSIWYG preview screen viewfinder... and it was ironically only mobile phones squeezing that sector of the market and dumbelling it so that at one end there was little more than toy cameras, and at the other, and often more expensive than entry level DSLR's CPS cameras, that prompted me to make the plunge and buy a DSLR, when the digi-pact pact up!
Which is to beg suggestion.... recognising the difference between convenience 'fast-photo' and ore considered, often for its own sake, 'slo-photo'.. do you really need or want to still buy into Digital? And if so, a Digital SLR?
so is it worth having it,as a "second"camera?
Who can say; as has been identified, depends a lot on the 35mm film camera. Minolta were pioneers of Auto-Focus, and in the 90's they assiduously 'pushed' that technology to market. Last of the 35mm film SLR's were as automated as a modern DSLR! They had Auto-Focus lenses, they had motor driven film transport, they had fully coupled 'TTL' automatic exposure metering, often with quite sophisticated metering algorithms. Only significant difference is you have to put film n them! But even there many had DX coding to set the film speed automatically, and some even had 'drop in' auto spooling to save having to faff threading the leader!
Other end of the scale, you had fully clockwork cameras like my old Russian Zenit; that were completely manual; manual focus manual settings, and you had to meter by eye or hand held meter to decide on settings, and wind the film on with a lever ad back i with a crank.
In between, and most of the, even early Japanese cameras like the early Manual focus Minolta's has 'some' sort of electronic Through The Lens metering, and most of them had some form of 'automatic exposure' coupled to the meter to set either shutter speed or aperture or both for you based on metering.
My 'preferred' 'slo-foto' camera is an old early 1970's Sigma MK1, which is a Japanese 'copy' of the then popular Richoc. Its all manual, all clockwork and all metal. Weighs a ton! Even the shutter is metal! But ts a overly 'tactle' camera to use; that weight makes it very stable, and when you fre the shutter it makes lots of delicious clunking noises, and winding it on, demands a certain effort, as it moves solid bits of brass inside the camera, and you can almost feel each one positively sliding and clicking into place. But, it benefits from a 'simple' through the lens light meter, with crude hi-lo swing needle display, which saves havng to carry or wave a hand held light meter about and takes away a little guess work, before making settings on those wonderful positive stop spring loaded knobs! Takes what 'were' twenty years ago 'Cheap' M42 screw fit lenses; and I continued the 'theme' building up the kit around it in 'all prime' lenses; which were often far better quality than more popular bayonet fit 'zooms', and similarly mechanically tactile.
To me it represented a 'useful' compromise. I d have a couple of Medium Format film cameras; one I rather like is a Zeis Ikonta from the 1940's.Fantastc 105mm lens, and that HUGE film area for all the loveliness it can delver to a picture.... even more 'slo-foto', it doesn't eve have a proper view finder! Let alone a light meter to look through one! It has a small sight glass or a wire 'framing guide', and you have to focus by guess-work or tape measure and a scale on the bellows! It's quite a demanding and satisfying camera to use, it's actually quite compact when folded down though so still very 'useable' for landscapes or people photography, but it's not 'so' versatile. But it IS so much that 'REAL' do it all yourself, make the camera work for you 'challenge' you might hope for from film, AND that renowned 120 Medium Format mage quality.
So, the ultimate answer is really how much 'Filminess' do you want or think you can handle? And beyond that how much convenience do you want, and what compromises you are prepared to make along the way.
Thinking about it,I guess it would improve my abilities,learning to take photographs without all the gimmicks of the modern day digital cameras
And there lies anther can of worms...... NO it won't. I was actually given my beloved Sigma MK1 in a loft clear out; reason being, "I never use it; too hard to work out" Lacking any 'easements' you HAVE to know what you are dong before you start, or learn by trial and error... which usually means lots of errors... and when that's costing 'per frame' it DOES get expensive.
You may be lucky with the Minolta, if its one of the more automated 35mm film cameras, in that it may have enough automation to get you up and running and getting results without too much research and practice... but its a camera not a tutor; it wont tell you what you aught to do, just do some of it for you.
Same applies to wdgetal.. though my 'entry level' Nikon D3200 does have an intriguing "Guide" mode on its function dial, that launches a menu driven tutorial for newbie's! Which I would rate as of 'questionable' merit really....It doesn't point at stuff and ask questions or give you tips or tell you what you are doing wrong.... it just sort of interrupts operations and gives you-tube tutorial come Windows 'diagnostic' user interrogation, on the display screen! BUT, at least you can delete your stakes and all you waste is a bit of battery charge!
Here, widgetal can start to pay; you can get up and taking photo's very readily, using all the point and press 'easement' they offer in 'auto' modes; and you can turn as much of that off as you want, as you read up on topics.
Curious and somewhat ironic phenomenon, I find though,i n the "Go Manual" camp, is that the automation that gets turned off is the automatic exposure metering..... which is the one bit of automation the camera is good at! Rarely here the suggestion to turn 'off' the Automatic Focus, which is something they are particularly 'bad' at, and where you can do more using 'selective focus' to exploit Depth of Ffield and put the focus range where you want it around your subject than blindly accepting the cameras decision to focus on a 'hard target' in the view finder, and arbiterily put DoF 1/3 infront and 2/3 behind that point! But still...
That is one area where manual focus film cameras CAN 'help' you learn, what is now a dyeing art it seems, with lenses that usually have focus distance scales on them AND usefully Depth of Field brackets against them, but still, you need to read up and learn the technique before you go try putting it into practice, practice practice to make perfect.... camera gives you the tools to do it, and may encourage you to try t, but still won't tell you how to do it!
So to conclude... old expression is never look a gift horse in the mouth! If camera is for free, then little harm in giving it a go! And as said, costs don't have to be exorbitant, and you might have to take an awful lot of film photo's before widgetal started to pay for itself saving on film and developing.
Possibility with a 'free' film camera, to extend its capability with accessories that have been rendered near obsolete and almost valueless by digital, does mean that you could go a long way, still very cheaply in the world of film, and the scope to get 'in' to home processing and self scanning, does offer potential to try an awful lot of stuff that would be prohibitively expensive buying the equivalent 'gear' for a modern DSLR.
Learning? Trial and error? Discipline and Diligence? NO camera can teach. Lack if easements on older film cameras may encourage it, but can equally discourage 'everything' if you don't have the patience. Digital ca offer a bit more here encouraging use, and suggesting trial and error, and not penalising you so much with costly mistakes, but f you have the determination to learn, it matters little, you'll get t from the reading and the tutoring not from the camera.
'Second Camera'. Your call. A lot depends on the camera, and your own motives and aspirations. Film SLR could be as good to get goig as a digital; if you have a compact or a mobile phone, for the times that you cant get what you want with them, and a SLR's added versatility might e useful, a free or 'cheap' film camera could be cheaper than diving into Digital SLR's; t could be your 'main' camera, rather than a second....
One thing to be wary of though, as I sit here, surrounded by cameras, wondering whether there are actually MORE cameras within arms reach at this moment, than I have take 'decent' pictures this year... and NOT wanting to admit the answer to that one..... even just to myself is probably 'YES!..... they are very very easy to accumulate!
Quick tally; within reach at this moment, are the Ziess Ikota, the Sigma MK1, the Zenit, there's also an Olympus O10, and an OM4, and three Olympus XA2 compacts; then there's a Voiglander Twin-Lens Reflex, and a Konica C35.... I think that's all the film cameras I can see All but two even have film i them.. and one of them has a box sat next to it waiting to be loaded! There's a few widgetals knocking about too! And a few ore film cameras 'upstairs'!
HEED what I said; its entropy! Expendature increases to consume the budget available; work expands to consume the time available; 'clutter' expands to fill the space available... and CAMERAS! they'll bid for the bloomin LOT, mate! Lol! But its all good fun.
Give your Dad's Minolta a whirl. See how you go. But don't think Digtal vs Film, don't think about the costs.. no just DONT. (I was going to say, 'per frame'.. but it doesn't matter, however you try rationalise them they'll drive you nuts! so just don't!) Thik PICTURES... that's what its all abot at the end of the day, and the kit you use to get them, really doesn't matter as long as it does!
