Photo Tips San Diego Underwater Photographic Society
Photo Tips
San Diego Underwater Photographic Society
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by Steve
Tietsworth
The Frugal Photographer If you're like me you burn up quite a few rolls of film every month. Unfortunately the film you probably use also happens to be one of the most expensive types you can buy; E-6 slide film ! Fujichrome Velvia and Kodak's new SW film now sells for over $9 for a 36 exposure roll. If you shoot 10 rolls a month that adds up to almost a hundred dollars, and that's not even including processing or printing your favorite images. Fortunately, there are some great ways to save money on film or allow you to shoot a lot more on the same budget. One easy approach is to shop around online and purchase film through dealers like Freestyle or Calumet. These companies provide a wide variety of photographic supplies and often have web specials that can save you a bunch of money on fresh, name brand films in factory packaging. To save even more money, you can often purchase film that is slightly out of date at even greater discounts. This film is typically cold stored for freshness. My experience has been that cold stored, slightly out of date film works every bit as well as fresh film. For critical work where exact color balance or flesh tone rendition are required you might choose not to use out of date film but for most general purpose work I find that it works very well and costs quite a bit less. For even greater savings, you can take the do it yourself approach a bit further and buy your film in bulk. Most 35 mm slide films can be purchased in bulk as 100 foot reels. As an example, a 100 foot reel of fresh (in date) Velvia sells for around $90 to $100. This reel translates into about 22 rolls of 36 exposures for a net cost of about $4.50 a roll. That's about half what a new factory packaged roll costs. If you haven't worked with bulk film before, don't worry, it's very easy to use. All you need to do is purchase a device called a bulk film loader (around $30 and available at Freestyle, Calumet, Nelson Photo here in San Diego, and lot's of other places) and some reloadable film cartridges (around 50 cents each). The reloadable cartridges can be used many times before replacement so you are really amortizing their cost over many rolls. The bulk loader comes with specific instructions but they all work in basically the same way. First, you | load the 100 ft reel into the loader. This is
the only step you need to do in complete darkness and it is very quick
and easy to do. The rest of the process is done in normal light by inserting
the reloadable cartridge into the bulk loader, attaching the end of the
film onto the cartridge, placing the cover on the cartridge and the loader,and then winding as many exposures onto the roll as you
want. This process gives you the added flexibility of winding rolls of
whatever size you want (up to 36 exposures). I often make 24 exposure rolls
of Velvia, which aren't commonly available. I also sometimes make short
rolls of only 10 or 12 exposures if I want to test equipment or experiment.
Reloading your own film also allows you to maximize your film savings.
I have purchased cold stored, out of date Velvia for as little as $40 a
roll from Freestyle, resulting in a net cost of about $1.80 for a 36 exposure
roll !
As for processing, I either process the film in my home darkroom with a Jobo processor (Another good way to save money if you shoot a lot of film), or take it to Chromacolor which gladly processes reloaded film and returns the cartridges so you can use them again. There is one caveat about getting reloaded film processed at commercial labs; they like to see the actual film to make sure it really is E-6 film. Other film types such as C-41 or black and white negative films can damage the chemical baths used to process the E-6 film. To keep the processors happy, when I rewind my film I don't wind it all the way back into the cartridge. This is easy to do, you just rewind and listen or feel the camera case until the film makes a slight click, indicating that it has released from the sprocket. Open the camera at this point, remove the film, and give it a couple of accordion folds so you know that it has been exposed. That's all there is to it. I'm sure you will enjoy the savings on film you can achieve by loading your own bulk film. In a year or two you might save enough to buy that new lens or camera you've been dreaming about !! Things We Can Learn from a Dog: #2 Allow the experience of fresh air and the wind in your face to be pure ecstasy. |
