Today’s Post by Joe Farace
Everyone has a photographic memory. Some just don”t have the film.—Anonymous
I received an email from a reader that continued a theme I’d talked about in a no-to-recent post about how expensive it can be to shoot film, mainly because of the cost of film these days. I just ordered two rolls of lford IlfoColor Vintage Tone 400 Plus Color Negative Film from Reformed Film Lab and it cost $15 per roll. Other on-line sources were selling it for a nickel less but I like what this scrappy little lab is doing and want to support them, if only in a small way.
The E-Mail & The Backstory
“Since shooting film is so expensive, do you plan to bulk load your 35mm film to save money?”—Gretchen, Timonium, MD. First, thanks for writing and I have lots of fond memories about Timonium; it was the place where my friend Ron and I restored the Arnolt-Bristol sports car that we co-owned.
Second, let me tell you a story: The year was 1977 and I was just finishing dinner in my Baltimore home, when my neighbor Ted called and asked for a favor. His publisher needed a portrait of him for his new book—The Squire of Warm Springs—and he needed to have it the next morning so it could be sent overnight to Chicago. Could I shoot a portrait of him right now? I said I would be glad to and grabbed my Nikon F2 (and don’t remember which lens) and when I looked in the refrigerator for some 35mm film there wasn’t any.
Then I remembered I had most of a 100-foot roll of Kodak Tri-X inside a bulk loader, which was all the rage with the cool kids at the Maryland Institute when I attended there. So I bulk loaded a roll and walked down the street to photograph Ted. He told me exactly the kind of image that he had in mind, with him standing in front of his historic home. I shoot about twelve frames or so and then drove to my then grandparents-in-laws home where my darkroom was located at the time.
I processed the film in D-76 with a 1+1 dilution and while waiting for it to dry, I visited with the old folks who had kindly turned over part of their basement for my use. Afterwards I went back downstairs and made a few 5×7 prints of (what I thought were) the best shots and placed them in a Kodak Blotter Print Roll to dry. Then I headed home where I took the dry prints, put them in an envelope, walked down the street and placed the envelope behind his screen door so Ted would have them first thing the next morning. The time? It was after midnight.
Can You Save Money Bulk Loading?
So now, let me answer your question about saving money by bulk loading: Maybe you can but maybe you can’t.
All the pundits and YouTube experts claim that you can save about 20 percent of your film costs by bulk loading. As I write this, a 36-exposure 35mm roll of Kodak Tri-X costs $8.99 at my local Mike’s Camera, so I should be able save $1.80 a roll, not counting the cost of film ($159.95 for 100-ft of Tri-X at B&H,) a bulk loader ($49.95 at B&H) and reloadable cassettes ($7.49 for a five-pack from B&H) that cannot be infinitely reloaded and if sent to a lab might not be returned. Plus there’s always the possibility of scratching the film during the process of loading the film, so you can see where this is going.
There’s no doubt that bulk loading 35mm film saved the day for my portrait of Mr. Lippman (at right) and I’m sure dedicated film shooters out there are saving money by bulk loading but right now I have more than 30 rolls of 35mm film in my refrigerator. I’m committed to shooting each and every one of them. And don’t get me started on medium format film; I have some of that too. (Watch my video “Medium Format, Schmedium Format” if you have 14 minutes to waste.)
Postcript: “Ted” was the Theo Lippman, Jr, a distinguished author and editorial writer at the Baltimore Sun newspaper, who passed away in 2014. The featured image is not the one the book publisher chose to use for his book, The Squire of Warm Springs, but was another frame from the same session and is the one the newspaper used for Ted’s obituary. Ted was the father of noted author Laura Lippman, who as a little girl, along with some other neighborhood kids would come by my home asking if my dog, Sherlock, could come out and play with them. And yes he did.
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