21st Century Film Photography

Many people might associate a photograph with the quick click of a shutter button and an upload to social media. However, there is a growing number of dedicated people putting in the time and effort needed to shoot their photographs on film, then develop and print them so they each can live on in the physical world for years to come.

Imagine taking all 36 images on a roll of 35mm film only to have to wait until you get home, or to a darkroom, just to see the photos you took. After loading the roll into a developing tank and processing it with the required chemicals, you finally are able to see the negative images you captured. Then, you take that film under the red light of a darkroom where you would begin printing the image. You project light through the negative using an enlarger and record its projection on photographic paper. That paper is then transferred through the development process and as you slide the sheet into a tray of chemicals, you begin to faintly see the photograph you took come to life right before your eyes.

An enlarger projects the negative film onto a sheet of paper inside the Northern Arizona University darkroom, Monday, April 3, 2023.

Photography will always live on as a way to document the things going on in the world around us, but we are slowly losing some of photography’s artistic, and tactile, sides. With so many photographers moving to social media, and leaving their images to live there, the physical end of the medium has been pushed to the fringes. Yet, a younger generation is proving that they are happy to work with this supposedly outdated technology.

Rahm Carrington is a photographer who works primarily with film. He currently works with a production company that he and a friend started that captures imagery of live musical concert performances called C-Roll Productions. 

Carrington began his photographic career while working on the road with bands doing marketing work. At the time, he was snapping photos on his cell phone to document these adventures, but quickly realized that there must be a better way to give these photos more of a life.

After being influenced by a long-time film photographer and personal mentor, Danny Clinch, Carrington picked up a hand-me-down film camera from his late father.

“Right away I was grabbed,” Carrington said.

A black-and-white, handmade darkroom printed photograph made May 20, 2023, from 35mm film.

After shooting film for about two years, Carrington found someone in his town of Austin, Texas who had access to a co-op darkroom space, and later a different darkroom space he spent a lot of time in during Covid-19 restrictions in 2020.

“Although I had been shooting film for a couple years, it wasn’t until I got into the darkroom and started making contact sheets and then prints, I really understood how much the way I’m shooting and exposing is affecting my photos,” Carrington said.

This was an important distinction Carrington discovered. He pointed out that when giving his film to a lab, the technician developing and scanning his images had a large role in how the final photo came out. Now, Carrington was able to have his hands in the entire process, thus enhancing his work, and learning a lot in the process.

“Then it really clicked into place for me to understand that [printing in the darkroom] really is the final step of film photography,” Carrington said.

The process of film photography has even influenced Carrington’s own daily life and how he views the experiences he has. Carrington mentioned that, similar to in life, some things with film are out of your control.

Light leaking into an old camera’s worn-out seals, water spots drying onto the negatives, or even rolls that turn out completely blank are all just part of it. With practice, the user gets better and can limit some of these factors, but as Carrington put it, “it is what it is, just surrender to it.”

One of Rahm Carrington’s darkroom prints is held above one of his recent print publications, “The Lot.” Carrington made this photo book by printing the collection of images in a darkroom before scanning each one to be printed into the book.

Today Carrington’s work follows two main subjects that he joked about.

“Cowboys and rockstars,” Carrington said. “Two very different worlds, even politically in a sense.”

This diversity in Carrington’s subjects has made him fear that viewers of his work would think he was trying to say something politically with these images.

“When I view something through the camera, it is an act of love from me to the world I’m in,” Carrington said.

With an open mind, these experiences with all walks of life have allowed him to connect with a diverse array of people all because of photography. A printed photograph is a common language that can be shared with anyone, and Carrington mentioned how handing a stranger a print has resulted in a whole new outlook.

In the world we live in today, with polarizing political figures on two sides, there is often little room for fitting somewhere in the middle, or even just understanding the differences these people have.

Carrington uses the lessons that film has taught him to go about this in a more spiritually accepting way than he had before, and just let some things be.

35mm film gives its own look and style as images produced with it often have a large amount of grain. Here, a saguaro cactus is captured using Ilford’s HP5+ film and the grain is quite apparent throughout the sky in the image.

For well over a century, photography, and the art of capturing a moment in time lived only in the physical space. Photographs were captured using a variety of methods that used a light-sensitive coating on paper or film that would then be developed through a process of corresponding chemicals.

When using transparent film to record the images, a photographer would then print that image onto a sheet of paper through a hands-on process in a darkroom. This left the photographer with something they would then hand to a friend, sell to a client, or hang on the wall of their family’s house.

Since the early 2000s, photography has jumped to a completely different world. With the introduction of digital sensors, cameras became far more accessible to learn and turnaround time for producing a final image was shortened dramatically. This, along with the rest of the world moving to an internet-based, digital realm forced the traditional film styles of photography out of the mainstream.

Even today, as the price of film continues to increase, people are continuing to buy and use it. In a podcast published in Sept. 2022, Vice President of film manufacturing at Kodak, Nagraj Bokinkere said, “Consumer demand, particularly for 35mm film, has exploded over the last few years. Retailers are constantly telling us they can’t keep these films on the shelf.”

In January of 2021, Fujifilm discontinued their most popular professional grade film stock, Pro 400H. This put extra pressure on other film manufactures like Kodak to supply more film to this growing market.

“In the film finishing area…we’ve grown from five days a week, single shifts, just a few years back, to last year we were three shifts, five days a week,” Bokinkere said. “Now we are a 24/7 operation.”

This struggle to supply has forced CineStill, another one of today’s leading manufactures of photographic film, to produce a new film, 400D, to help take some of the load off of Kodak and fill a hole in the market. This goes to show that even in an age like the digital one we are living in today, people are interested using traditional methods of photography due to their unique nature.

Many users find these older 35mm film cameras to be more enjoyable to use because of their unique design compared to today’s modern digital cameras. Pictured here is a Canon A-1 with its original box.

During the early years of the digital revolution, companies like Fujifilm and Kodak, who were easily the two most powerful sellers of photographic film, began shifting to make and distribute equipment for digital photography. They were also forced to cut back on their production of film because that was the way the industry was going.

Digital photography brought to the world a much simpler process for the everyday, casual photographer. Gone were the days of physically loading each 35mm roll in the camera after taking your allotted 36 photographs.

The photographer no longer needed to wait, or pay, for their local drugstore to develop and print their film either. And perhaps the most groundbreaking innovation that came with these new digital cameras was the ability for the photographer to see and review their image right there in real time on the screen directly on the camera. This clearly made it an easier learning process and perhaps more approachable to someone with little knowledge of focusing mechanics, or exposure settings.

While digital photography continues to be the primary medium for a majority of photographers these days, the previous traditional forms of film photography are showing quite a revival. Today, both Kodak and Fujifilm struggle to keep their stock of film as they battle with consumer demand. According to the Eastman Kodak Company’s November 2019 press release, “the company’s film business grew 21% year-over-year for the year to date.”

The Sonoran Desert, captured on 35mm Fujifilm Superia 400.

So, what does this timeline look like regarding this resurgence of film today?

Well, film was really all there was until digital began to make the technological advancements it needed to become a competitor during the late 1990s-early 2000s. Companies like Kodak and Fujifilm did not ignore the innovation of digital imaging at all.

Kodak was actually among the first to develop a working digital camera in 1975, although it was far from being considered a replacement for film as it took nearly 25 seconds to “capture one 0.01 megapixel black and white image,” according to an ABC News article published this year. And Fujifilm continues to make some of the most innovative digital cameras in recent years.

But as competitors like Canon and Nikon began making real improvements in digital imaging during the 2000s, more and more people made the switch to this new technology they were told was superior to film. However, the images from digital cameras during this time were far from what they are today. Because of things like instant turnaround and the ability to review images, consumers flocked to the digital medium.

A sheet of 4x5 film allows for much higher resolution images from film, like this 11x14 black-and-white print made from enlarging a sheet of 4x5 Ilford HP5+ film.

At this same time, the internet began to take off and images were being printed as physical copies far less than they were during the decade prior. Instead, photographs were now being shared through things like email, and more recently, social media.

Another unfortunate consequence for working professional photographers during this transition to digital was focused on the topic of pricing. Instead of charging clients more for digital photographs, due to them having to buy all new cameras and equipment, they charged less because they thought they no longer needed to shell out money for developing and printing. This in turn greatly hurt working photographers as they were now all forced to compete for the lowest prices to appeal to their clients.

The combination of these factors aided in the digital revolution and forced film photography, and its sister processes of alternate printing like cyanotypes and Van Dyke Brown, so far away from the average consumer’s mind that the medium nearly disappeared for over a decade.

During this time, there were still professional, and hobbyist photographers who continued working with film, which at the time was reaching an all-time low in cost as demand was near nonexistent. As the years went on, digital imaging reigned supreme. With capable cameras built into the smartphones in everyone’s pockets, and groundbreaking technology in cameras including extreme low-light performance and incredible autofocus speeds, there was beginning to be less reason to even consider shooting film as the 21st century progressed.

However, according to the general manager of film at Eastman Kodak, Ed Hurley, the company is “making more than twice the amount of rolls [of film] in 2019 than they made in 2015.”

This is a major jump that shows how demand for film has increased quite dramatically over just four years. Today, 35mm film is getting hard to find in stock at most of the large online retailers, like B&H and Freestyle Photo.

Leica has continued to produce brand new film cameras to this day. The Leica M6 was recently issued for reproduction in October 2022.

Steve Carter is the head of marketing and outreach at CineStill Film. CineStill is a company that was first started by professional photographers who began spooling their own film for themselves. That eventually turned into them selling to friends, then through online sites like Etsy, and then they ultimately signed a distribution deal, and the company became official in 2013. They are now among the top manufacturers of photographic film.

In an interview, Carter spoke about how the company has seen a “dramatic spike in the growth of film” over the last five years. Prior to that there was only a very slow and steady increase since about 2010.

CineStill has seen this spike firsthand, and they say it is “being led by millennials and gen-z.” The company’s largest demographics on social media are 18-24 and 24-30 years of age.

Most of these younger generations growing into adulthood now were rarely exposed to physical media like previous generations were. The news was on TV, messages were sent through text, music was listened to through MP3 files or Spotify, and photographs were shared through social media. Because of this, these people long for something that needs physical input like film does. This is also one reason why vinyl records are making a similar comeback in recent years.

Millennials, on the other hand, did have some of those physical things during their childhood, but they disappeared very quickly in their lives. Carter said he believes these people have begun taking up film photography as it “felt nostalgic” to remember their parents photographing on film when they were young.

“Film is an organic process, it is capturing light in that moment,” Carter said. “It’s not just numbers and software and all that. It’s really a special thing.”