Is shooting film still worth it once you price out development and scanning? Film

The discipline is real and it is also the cheapest thing on your list to fake. Put a 50mm on your digital body, set it to manual, cover the screen with gaffer tape and give yourself thirty-six frames before you are allowed to look. If you do that for a month and still want film, you want film for its own sake, which is a perfectly good reason and the only one that survives the third month. Everyone who starts shooting film to become more deliberate and stops, stops around roll six when the lab bill arrives.

Six months in as a beginner, so here is the unglamorous report. My first four rolls were mostly unusable, two of them because I had the meter wrong and one because I opened the back. That is roughly ninety pounds of learning that a digital body gives you for free in an afternoon. It got much better after that and I do love it, but nobody warned me that the tuition fee is paid in rolls.

Home development changes the maths more than anything else. Black and white at home is genuinely simple: a changing bag, a tank, two chemicals and a thermometer, and after the initial outlay you are somewhere around the cost of the film alone. Colour at home is possible but it wants tighter temperature control and most people go back to the lab. If you shoot black and white and scan with a digital camera and a macro lens you may already own, the per-roll cost drops enough to change the decision.

Have the body serviced before you commit. Inherited cameras usually have sticky slow shutter speeds and dried light seals, and you will spend three rolls blaming yourself for problems the camera is causing. A service costs about two rolls and turns an unknown into a tool.

Shop around on the lab, the spread is enormous. Mine went from about GBP 14 to about GBP 8 a roll for develop and scan by switching to a postal lab, with the trade-off being a week of waiting and lower resolution scans unless I pay more. If the local place is your only option that price is on the high side.