Film Photography: My Journey Back to Film

A homage to the craft of analog and darkroom photography — classifieds for cameras, lenses, and darkroom gear, and a growing directory of film-friendly shops.

Browse Classifieds View Directory

A History of Film Photography

Film photography is, in the long view, the result of two converging traditions: a centuries-old understanding of how light could be focused through a lens to form an image, and a much younger chemistry that learned how to make that image permanent. The camera obscura was a tool of Renaissance painters and Enlightenment scientists long before anyone could fix what it showed onto a surface. What we now call film — a flexible support coated with a light-sensitive emulsion — did not exist until the late nineteenth century, and the cameras built to use it have shaped the visual record of the modern world for more than 150 years.

From Bitumen to Gelatin: The Birth of the Photographic Image

The earliest surviving photograph was made around 1826 or 1827 by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, who coated a pewter plate with bitumen of Judea and exposed it in a camera obscura for hours from a window at his estate in Le Gras, France. The image is faint, almost ghostly, but it is the beginning of everything that follows. In 1839, Louis Daguerre's announcement of the daguerreotype — a silvered copper plate rendered light-sensitive with iodine vapor — gave the world its first practical photographic process. The same year, William Henry Fox Talbot in England introduced the calotype, the first negative-positive process and the conceptual ancestor of every film camera made since.

For most of the nineteenth century, photography meant glass plates. The wet collodion process introduced by Frederick Scott Archer in 1851 produced beautiful, detailed negatives but required the photographer to coat, sensitize, expose, and develop the plate while it was still wet — typically inside a portable darkroom tent. The arrival of the gelatin dry plate, perfected by Richard Leach Maddox and refined through the 1870s, freed photographers from that constraint. Plates could be coated in a factory, stored for months, and developed at leisure. It was this innovation — a stable, factory-coated silver halide emulsion suspended in gelatin — that made film, as we know it, possible.

How Film Is Made

At its heart, photographic film is a remarkably simple idea executed with extraordinary precision. A flexible plastic base is coated with a thin layer of gelatin in which microscopic crystals of silver halide — usually silver bromide, sometimes with additions of silver iodide or silver chloride — are suspended. When light strikes one of these crystals, it causes a tiny number of silver ions to be reduced to metallic silver, forming what is called a latent image. Development amplifies this invisible change chemically, converting the exposed crystals into visible grains of black metallic silver. The unexposed crystals are then dissolved away in a fixer, leaving a stable negative.

The base material has evolved over time. George Eastman's earliest roll films used paper, which had to be stripped after development. By 1889 he had introduced flexible cellulose nitrate film, which was clear and durable but dangerously flammable — many old archives have been lost to nitrate fires. Cellulose acetate "safety film" replaced nitrate over the course of the twentieth century, and most modern films use polyester (PET) for sheet films and triacetate or polyester for roll films, depending on the manufacturer and format.

Color film is a more elaborate construction: typically three separate emulsion layers stacked on a single base, each sensitized to a different part of the spectrum (blue, green, and red), each containing dye couplers that form cyan, magenta, and yellow dyes during color development. The coating of these multilayer emulsions is done on enormous, climate-controlled machines in absolute darkness, with tolerances measured in microns. Only a handful of factories in the world — Harman Technology in England, Kodak in Rochester, Fujifilm in Japan, ORWO in Germany, INOVISCOAT in Germany on contract for several brands — still make photographic film at scale.

The 35mm Camera

The 35mm format did not originate in still photography at all. The 35mm width was established by Thomas Edison and William Kennedy Laurie Dickson in the late 1880s for motion picture film, and for decades it remained a cinema standard. The decisive moment for still photography came in the workshops of Ernst Leitz in Wetzlar, Germany, where a microscope engineer named Oskar Barnack built a small prototype camera around 1913 to test motion picture film stocks. He called it the Ur-Leica. The First World War delayed production, but in 1925 the Leica I went on sale and quietly redefined what a camera could be.

Barnack's insight was that a smaller negative, enlarged later, could give a serious photographer something no plate camera could: portability, discretion, and speed. The 24×36mm frame became the universal small-format standard. Zeiss Ikon answered with the Contax in 1932, introducing the bayonet mount and the vertical-travel metal focal-plane shutter. In the United States, the Argus C3 — a brick-shaped rangefinder introduced in 1939 — brought 35mm photography to the middle class. After the Second World War, Japanese manufacturers rebuilt their industries around the format, and Nikon's release of the Nikon F in 1959 marked the arrival of the modern professional 35mm SLR: an integrated system of interchangeable lenses, finders, screens, and motor drives that would dominate photojournalism, sports, and editorial work for the next forty years.

Through the 1960s and 1970s, Canon, Pentax, Minolta, Olympus, and Konica refined the SLR into one of the most highly evolved consumer products ever made. Through-the-lens metering, aperture-priority and program automation, and finally autofocus in the mid-1980s gradually moved decisions out of the photographer's hands and into the camera body. By the time digital sensors began to overtake film in the early 2000s, the 35mm SLR had become so refined that the transition to its digital descendants was almost seamless. The format itself, though, has proven remarkably durable. New 35mm cameras are still being made — by Leica, by Pentax, by a growing cottage industry of small manufacturers — and used cameras from the format's golden age remain in heavy daily use around the world.

120 Film and the Medium Format Camera

The 120 format predates the 35mm still camera by more than two decades. Kodak introduced 120 film in 1901 for the Brownie No. 2, a simple box camera intended for amateurs. The film was wider than 35mm, wound onto a spool with a paper backing printed with frame numbers visible through a red window. Almost everything that the format would later become — its emphasis on image quality over portability, its association with thoughtful rather than reflexive shooting — was implied by that original design.

The interwar years produced two enduring approaches to medium format. The folding camera, with a bellows that collapsed flat against the body, made high-quality negatives possible in a coat pocket; the Zeiss Ikon Super Ikonta and Voigtländer Bessa series remain coveted today. The twin-lens reflex, introduced commercially by Franke & Heidecke as the Rolleiflex in 1929, paired a taking lens with a viewing lens above it and a waist-level finder, and became the dominant tool of mid-century portrait, fashion, and street photographers — Vivian Maier, Diane Arbus, and Irving Penn all used Rolleis.

The modular medium-format SLR is largely Victor Hasselblad's invention. The 1600F of 1948 was followed in 1957 by the 500C, the camera that defined the V-system: a leaf-shuttered, modular cube with interchangeable lenses, film backs, and viewfinders. Hasselblad cameras went to the moon in the late 1960s and have been a fixture of studio photography ever since. Mamiya answered with the RB67 (1970) and the rotating-back RZ67, designed for working studios shooting 6×7 chromes. Pentax built the bigger, simpler 6×7 — an oversized SLR shaped like a 35mm camera, beloved by landscape and fashion photographers for the directness of its handling. Bronica, Contax (with the 645), and Fuji's GW and GSW rangefinders all carved out their own corners of the market.

120 film accommodates a remarkable variety of negative sizes. The same roll can yield sixteen 6×4.5 frames, twelve square 6×6 frames, ten 6×7 frames, eight 6×9 frames, or as few as four panoramic 6×17 frames in a specialized camera like the Linhof Technorama. This flexibility is part of why the format has endured. A medium-format negative carries roughly three to five times the area of a 35mm frame, and the resulting tonality, detail, and shallow rendering of depth remain difficult to match in any other way.

Large Format: 4×5, 5×7, and 8×10

Before roll film, all serious photography was large format. The view camera — a lens board and a ground-glass back joined by a bellows, mounted on a rail or a folding bed — is the oldest camera type still in regular use, and its essential design has changed remarkably little in 150 years. What has changed is the supporting equipment: lenses are sharper, shutters more reliable, films faster and finer-grained, but the camera itself remains a precise mechanical apparatus for placing a sheet of film in a plane parallel to (or deliberately tilted away from) a lens.

The 4×5 format became the working standard of American press and commercial photography in the first half of the twentieth century. The Speed Graphic, made by Graflex in Rochester from 1912 into the 1970s, was the camera of the news photographer — the camera Weegee carried through the streets of New York and Joe Rosenthal raised on Iwo Jima. After the war, the rise of the rigid monorail view camera — Sinar in Switzerland, Cambo in the Netherlands, Toyo in Japan — moved 4×5 into the studio, where the format's full range of movements (rise, fall, shift, tilt, swing) became essential for product and architectural work. Field cameras from Wista, Tachihara, Linhof, and Ebony adapted the same principles for landscape work in folding wooden bodies.

The 5×7 format occupies an unusual middle ground. It is large enough to make a beautiful contact print but small enough to handle in the field, and its 5:7 aspect ratio is closer to the proportions of the human visual field than either 4×5 or 8×10. It was once a popular portrait format, particularly for the elegant rectangular composition it allowed, but it has never had the commercial dominance of its neighbors. Cameras and lenses for 5×7 are correspondingly less common, though Ebony, Chamonix, and several artisanal makers continue to produce new bodies.

The 8×10 camera is, for many photographers, the largest format that can still be considered practical for fieldwork. Edward Weston, Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham, and the rest of Group f/64 made their reputations on 8×10 negatives, and the format remains the standard for serious contact-printing — a 1:1 print from an 8×10 negative is large enough to be a finished work in its own right, with a tonal smoothness no enlargement can fully replicate. The Deardorff V8, built in Chicago from 1923 into the 1980s, is the iconic American 8×10 camera; newer wooden field cameras from Chamonix, Ebony, Lotus, Ritter, and Wisner carry the tradition forward. A complete 8×10 outfit — camera, lenses, holders, tripod, dark cloth, meter — typically weighs forty to sixty pounds, which is part of the discipline of the format.

Ultra-Large Format

Beyond 8×10 lies a category of cameras that has always been more art than industry. Eleven by fourteen, fourteen by seventeen, sixteen by twenty, and twenty by twenty-four inch cameras have been built in small numbers for more than a century, mostly for portrait studios and for photographers committed to contact printing at exhibition size. Banquet cameras — 7×17, 8×20, and 12×20 — were developed in the late nineteenth century to photograph large dinners and group portraits in a panoramic format. The Cirkut camera, introduced around 1907, rotated on its tripod to expose a moving roll of film, making continuous panoramic group photographs that could exceed twenty feet in length.

The most famous ultra-large-format camera of the modern era is Polaroid's 20×24 instant camera, a wheeled studio fixture built in the late 1970s in a run of fewer than ten. Chuck Close, William Wegman, and Mary Ellen Mark all worked with it. A handful of these cameras still operate today, fed by hand-coated film produced by specialists after Polaroid's collapse. New ultra-large-format cameras continue to be built one or two at a time by makers like Richard Ritter, Lotus View Camera, and a small number of independent craftsmen. Film for these formats is generally cut down from larger master rolls by Ilford in their annual ULF special order, by Bergger, by Fomapan, and by a few specialist suppliers — an arrangement that has kept the practice alive against considerable economic odds.

The Present and the Persistence of Film

Film photography was widely declared dead in the years between roughly 2004 and 2012, as digital sensors overtook film in resolution and dynamic range, professional labs closed, and several film manufacturers either collapsed (Polaroid, Agfa Consumer) or radically contracted (Kodak). What has happened since is one of the more interesting reversals in the history of any creative medium. Demand for film has grown steadily for more than a decade. Harman Technology, which makes Ilford black and white films, has added shifts. Kodak has restarted Ektachrome and Gold 200 in 120, and is investing in new coating capacity. Fujifilm continues to produce a smaller but stable line. New manufacturers — Lomography, Film Washi, Adox, Ferrania, CineStill, and others — have built businesses around the format. Used film cameras, from Leicas to Hasselblads to view cameras, are being traded at prices that would have astonished anyone in 2008.

What this revival has clarified is that film is not, and never really was, a technology in competition with digital imaging. It is a different medium with a different set of properties — a physical, chemical, and optical process that produces an object rather than a file, and that asks a different kind of attention from the photographer. The history of film photography is still being written, in coating machines in Mobberley and Rochester and in darkrooms around the world.