Medium format basic costs

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OK, as you may have seen from my previous thread I'm looking at jumping into medium format photography. There's been some very persuasive reasoning and I'm almost there. The next part is to get an idea of cost. So having a quick scan around I have a few ball park prices, is there anything else I need to consider cost wise?

Kodak Portra 400 120 roll, 5 pack on amazon this is 19.99 so looking at 4 quid a roll, not sure how many exposures you get per roll though.
Ilford FP4, 125 asa, 10 pack on amazon for £40.30, again about 4 quid a roll. Possibility to join a local darkroom setup for a members fee and have cheap hire of a dark room. (£80 per year and £3 per hour hire, then of course you have paper and stuff to get.)
Fuji FP100C Polaroid pack film, on amazon 10 prints for 12.55, 1.25 per shot. I love the idea of doing a few of these.

I'm assuming i'm looking at about 4 quid a roll again for processing? How much and how easy is it to do at home? Is that black and white only?

Budget wise I was looking at between 300 and 400 for a camera set up, going off what others have said and stuff I've read I'm looking at a Mamiya RZ67, I'm not sure what lens to go for first though.

All help appreciated and I'm sure there are a load of people out there thinking the same thing as me.
 
10 shots per roll on an RB/RZ @ 6x7, 12 if you were shooting a 6x6 camera and 15 on a 645 :)

Process b/w at home, its too easy not to.

Colour is slightly different in that whether you are souping slide (E6) or colour neg (C41), the chemicals must be kept at a constant 38 degrees, whereas b/w soups at room temperature 20 degrees.
 
I won't try to answer all the questions in one go as I'm sure lots of people will chip in.

I use an RZ67 and that camera, or any other that takes 6*7 images, will give 10 exposures on a 120 roll (incidentally the actual images are a bit smaller than 6*7, about 57 * 69mm, but that is also true with other 120 cameras.

The focal lengths of lenses to use will be heavily influenced by the type of photography you do. Mine is mostly landscape and I use the 50mm, 65mm, and 110mm lens extensively, and very occasionally a 180mm lens. In 35mm terms they equate to 25mm, 32mm, 55mm, and 90mm. If I wanted to limit myself to two lenses on an outing it would be the 50mm and 110mm, and there have been occasions when I have only used the 65mm for a day. But if you're into portraits you're more likely to use the 180mm.

If you buy an RZ67 as a kit with one lens, it seems quite common to get the 90mm lens, which is equivalent to 45mm in 35mm terms.

I haven't paid for processing for some time but I think £4 a roll might be a bit low once you pay postage, if there isn't an option local to you. I develop my own colour and B&W and ocasionally print B&W in the darkroom - hoping to do the first session for a few months tomorrow - and almost all my darkroom equipment I got for free from people who had converted to digital.

The prices you quote for film from Amazon look quite reasonable but it depends how much you pay for postage. You can buy 5 rolls of Portra 400 at 7dayshop for £19.99 which is including postage. These days I just buy 5 rolls at a time from them which means it fits through the letterbox so I don't have to go to the sorting office to collect it.
 
I'd start with an 85mm f2.8 lens, which is like a 50mm on a 35mm camera I think
 
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remmber to look on ebay for film, i got some fp100c and fp3000b from germany slightly cheaper than from UK

id recommend grabbing some fp3000b asap as its discontinued or will be.

fyi with fp100c u can reclaim the negative (its fragile tho), do image transfers, and imulsion lifts. and you get a positive and seporate negative

fp3000b you get a negative which i dont think you need to reclaim, cant do image transfers, can do emusion lifts

for slide film its worth considering skipping prints, ones i had done dont quite have the magic of slide to them, kinda someway towards that but quite "normal"
 
In addition to all of the above - commercial B&W processing is usually quite a bit more expensive than colour processing, so it really makes financial sense to process your own. You can soup a roll of B&W film for as little as 20p, so it doesn't take many commercially processed rolls at £8 to pay for the start-up costs of tank/bag/thermometer/jugs. It's also a lot of fun.
 
why do bw films cost more to dev comercialy? is it more manual stuff to be done?
 
I put off doing my own b&w processing for years because I thought it was difficult and I would mess up... it isn't and I (mainly) haven't.
Basically you just need a dark bag, about £25 ish, a sink, some bottles to mix the chemicals and a tank to put the film and chemicals in.
I use the app called The Massive Dev Chart which gives all the timings for most combinations of film and developer and even tells you when to agitate the tank, cracking idea and works very well.
I can almost guarantee that not only will you enjoy it but it will make the process of image making a much fuller and more satisfying experience.(y)

Andy
 
Thanks for the input guys, all great stuff.

Looking at the RZ67, I might be pushing it at my budget. Basically I want the camera, a walk about lens.a 120 back and a polaroid back. I may have to scale down to the RB model.
 
I think a reasonable price for colour 120 film is about a fiver a roll in my experience, and this is for C-41 or E-6. Obviously if you post your films off for processing you need to add postage. You might get lucky and find somewhere nearby that does colour 120 film, but (in my area at least) there don't seem to be that many around, I think maybe 2-3 places within an hours drive? Luckily one of them is a ten mintue walk from where I work, so I can drop it off at lunch and pick it up after work :D

As others have said, B&W is so incredibly easy to do once you have the hang of it. Also I don't know of any places anywhere even close to me that dev B&W 120, so it's silly not to do it yourself. Although, for the first few rolls of B&W I'd probably send them off for processing, just so if you have any problems then there's one less variable. Once you get comfortable using the camera and know that it works properly, crack on with home developing! You can buy a basic dev kit, a bag and the chemicals for less than £100. I'm really impatient with wanting to see my photos so developing at home means I can see my photos in 2-3 hours after they've dried, rather than 2-3 days or even weeks! The chemicals are cheap too and some of them last for a very long time, so it's a fraction of the cost.

Printing is way beyond me (it's on my to-do list, though!), but if you opt to scan your film then a new scanner is about £150 and will pay for itself after about 20 rolls, as labs charge a fortune for that service.
 
steveo_mcg said:
@freecom2 did a good breakdown of the chemcial costs a while back, its not changed much over the last year or so and its really is buttons.

http://www.talkphotography.co.uk/threads/cost-of-diy-film-processing-per-roll.347210/#post-3962781
Click to expand...

Cost of DIY film processing per roll (the post you linked to is my later reply, which isn't anywhere near as useful :banana:)

I've just updated the prices. T-Max Developer has actually dropped a few quid, and the Kenro filing pages have increased slightly, but overall it actually works out slightly cheaper. I've added a couple of extra things from experience over the years (you won't get a litre of developer, after waste and leakage it's usually about 950mL), but conservatively that's still 75p a roll.

That price will increase with:
One-shot developer
Using a different brand of wetting agent (they all do the same thing anyway)
 
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freecom2 said:
Cost of DIY film processing per roll (the post you linked to is my later reply, which isn't anywhere near as useful :banana:)

I've just updated the prices. T-Max Developer has actually dropped a few quid, and the Kenro filing pages have increased slightly, but overall it actually works out slightly cheaper. I've added a couple of extra things from experience over the years (you won't get a litre of developer, after waste and leakage it's usually about 950mL), but conservatively that's still 75p a roll.

That price will increase with:
One-shot developer
Using a different brand of wetting agent (they all do the same thing anyway)
Click to expand...


no I didn't :cautious: :D

I blame the browser....

I hate to think about the % wastage with Rodinal, you use so little and often that the trickle you drop down the side of the measuring cylinder is probably a significant proportion of the developer actually used.
 
I've made myself a Excel spreadsheet to keep track of how much my developing costs me, mainly so I can see where the big chunks are going and try to reduce them a bit. I just put the numbers into the white boxes and it's all done using formulas. For 6x7 I reckon it costs me £1.14 a roll to develop, and when you add the price of the film and Kenro holder it works out at about £5.61 a roll, or 56p a shot. For 6x6 its 47p a shot.

View attachment 26134
No idea how many time I can reuse the stop and fixer, so I've been going for about ten. Means my costs are probably off but it's close enough for me :)
 
If that's Ilford Rapid Fix, you can probably use it more than 10 times. You can test if the fix is still good by checking how long it takes to clear film.
 
freecom2 said:
If that's Ilford Rapid Fix, you can probably use it more than 10 times. You can test if the fix is still good by checking how long it takes to clear film.
Click to expand...

Yeah it is, don't think there's such a thing as "rapdid" fixer... :oops: :$ :facepalm: I've only recently started developing myself, so it's not something I've looked into too much, but I might try it next time using that link that @steveo_mcg just gave. Cheers guys :)
 
We ought to prefix B&W with traditional since we can shoot CN B&W film c41 machine processed......to avoid confusion :)
 
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