I like the Olympus camera that I purchased 40+ years ago.

[no_hypocrisy]

What is the future for photography that uses film and developing, esp. black and white?

[TreasonousBastard]

1. extremely limited.

[brush]

2. It must be hard to find film even. Kodak is hanging on by a thread.

Their leadership totally swung and missed several times as the digital revolution turned their film business upside down. Is Fuji still a reliable source for film?

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

3. There are hobbyists and artists that prefer to use film.

It's harder to get film and processing than it used to be but it's still out there. You might try hooking up with a camera club whose members develop their own film. It will be more expensive than digital photography, of course. I used to have an Olympus OM-1 that I liked a lot.

[Major Nikon]

4. Adorama still has 187 choices for B&W film

https://www.adorama.com/l/Photography/Film-and-Darkroom-Equipment/Film/Black-and-White-Film

Mailers are still the best deal for developing. If you want some I guest you stock up now as the 5 packs are significantly cheaper and Adorama has them listed as closeout. The individual mailers are $13 so $5 more each.
https://www.adorama.com/fjsm36p.html

There's still folks on Etsy that will do developing:
https://www.etsy.com/listing/594684535/35mm-black-and-white-film-processing-and

You can also buy the equipment and chemicals to do it yourself. It's not that difficult and all you need is a bathroom or closet you can make completely dark, or use a bag to transfer the film to the developing tank.

[IADEMO2004]

5. I have great pics from nearly 50 yr old Yashica but I'll never want to use it again.

I can't say moving to digital was very satisfying in the beginning.

Somehow I have old cameras owned by grandparents and relatives some fancy most not.


Enjoy showing pictures movies and videos with cameras that produced them.

[TreasonousBastard]

6. I'll add to what I said above-- I had a functioning darkroom years ago and...

did my own developing and printing. Mostly B&W, but some color. Color was largely formulaic, and you couldn't really make the subtle changes like you can do with B&W.

Even did my own Type C Color and Ektachrome, but rarely worth the trouble. Kodachrome has to be done by a lab because the couplers aren't in the film and have to be added during processing. Carefully.

Bought 100' foot rolls of Tri-X and loaded my own cartridges. Shot like you shoot digital nowadays and threw away 90% of the stuff. I used a stock Kodak developer DK-50 and tried making it from scratch, but wasn't worth the trouble. I did make my own paper developer-- a two bath developer where you started making a boldly contrasty print (On low-contrast paper) and then moved it into a less contrasty solution to fill in the gaps. It extended the tonal range of the print way beyond anything you would imagine.

Then, some of them I had printed to 30x40 matte paper and hand colored them with Marshall's oils. Sold a bunch of those.

Moving up to 6x6 film made everything even nicer in B&W. Never got the Hasselblads I drooled over, but can't imagine how much better they would have been than my Minolta C-330.

On edit-- Panatomic X was incredible. Absolutely no grain if you did it right.

[alfredo]

7. If you have an Olympus or Lumix digital body, you can adapt the lens

I think you can use it with just about any digital camera with an enexpensive adaptor.

Old Olympus lenses pull in good money on eBay.

[sir pball]

8. It's nowhere near as dire as the naysayers make it out to be.

I've gotten back into shooting my old Nikkormat and while it's definitely a smaller ecosystem, it's not going anywhere soon. The film market has actually been growing the last few years, driven both by hipsters wanting to be ironically retro with the Holgas, and their 90s-era point-and-shoots, and enthusiastic amateurs wanting to learn about or get back to the nuts and bolts behind the digital trickery, or do things you simply can't do with Photoshop.

Fuji still makes the single greatest film of all time, Velvia, along with a decent line of slide and negative films. Kodak is merrily churning out Portra, by far my favorite negative film, and has even revived Ektachrome in light of the growing demand. Sadly no Kodachrome...yet - nobody's made a digital filter that can get that look...

The B&W landscape has been stable for a couple of decades; Ilford still makes the Delta line and Kodak still makes T-Max and Tri-X. Of course, home development is the way to go, and all that hardware and chemistry is still readily available. If you want to make actual silver halide prints, your options are more limited (and expensive), but given that there's still nothing digital that comes close to a medium-format B&W film printed on fiber-base paper, I don't think that niche is going to entirely disappear anytime soon.

Happy shooting!