What is the cost of shooting film?
Shooting film is such a refreshing experience compared to shooting digital. It’s a sense of calming, having to take a step back, and think about the individual shot you’re about to take, rather than overshooting a subject which you’re never going to edit, and worse yet - use up valuable storage space. Also, the price of film cameras are surprisingly cheap, well atleast compared to the lastest digital technology. But the trickiest part when first starting out in shooting film, is understanding the cost as there’s a few steps to receive your freshly developed film back ready to share - which we’ll jump right into. So read on below to find out what the cost is of shooting film. No messing about here!
Film Stock
Assuming you’ve already purchased your film camera (35mm / 110mm/ 120mm), you’ll then want to choose your film stock. Each stock is unique, which you’ll have to choose based on what and where you intend to shoot, and how sensitive the film you may need. For example:
A low ISO film stock will be good for shooting outside. Alternatively a high ISO film stock will be good for shooting inside.
Film stocks are however versatile. For example my pictures above were taken with a film stock of ISO 800 - which I chose for the contrast and colour saturation of the film, moreso than the film sensitivity.
Film can be pricey, for example below, the current cost for a single roll of 35mm CineStill 800t film is £23.75 for 36 exposures, which currently equals to 65p per image taken - and we haven’t taken into account the developing yet!
Please note, there are cheaper film stocks - I just really like using these, Kodak Ektar’s and Kodak Portra’s, which are all a similar cost.
CineStill 800T 35mm Film on Amazon
Developing
Let’s assume you’ve now taken all your images on your camera and you’re ready to get them developed. This section comes in two parts - the physical sending of the film in the post and paying the developing house to process the film.
Due to the size of the physical film you’re sending off - you have to pay a slight premium for it being classed as a ‘small parcel’. The cheapest service I’ve found is using Evri which costs £3.29. You can send off a few rolls of film at once to combine the cost - but if you’re like me, you just can’t wait to see your images! This puts our current total up to £27.04 or £0.75 per image.
Next up, your developing service. There’s two companies I’ve used in the past. PhotoHippo, based in Burnley or Analogue Wonderland which is typically online. When developing you can often have a few options; if you want a digital download, phyiscal prints, to receive them on a USB stick and so on - but you’ll always get your film negatives back as standard.
For C41 colour film 35mm film processing with digital downloads; Photo Hippo costs £7.50 and Analogue Wonderland costs £13.95.
Let’s go with Photo Hippo and tally up the final cost per image.
The total cost of shooting a single roll of film
As you could have worked out from the discussion so far - shooting film does not come cheap! Which is another reason to take the process slow and make every shot matter. Let’s summarise the costs below:
Film stock: £23.75
Film postage: £3.29
Film developing: £7.50
Total cost for a single roll of film: £34.54, which works out to be £0.95 per image.
In the process of shooting film, you’re going to have the occasional blurry image, the overexposed shot, the noisy image here and there - but remember, it’s all part of the process. So relax, have fun and try something different.
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