How to Start Film Photography: A Beginner's Guide

Most guides to starting film photography begin with a list of cameras. That is the wrong place to start, because the camera is the least consequential of the decisions you are about to make. A $60 point-and-shoot with a decent lens and a roll of HP5 Plus will teach you more in one afternoon than a $900 SLR with a bad film choice will teach you in a month.

Here is the order that actually matters.

1. Decide how the film will get developed before you buy anything

This is the decision that determines everything else. If you are going to send film to a lab, you are choosing between colour and black-and-white, and you are accepting that you will not see a result for a week. If you are going to develop at home, you need a tank, a changing bag, three chemicals and a thermometer — about the price of two rolls of film and a lab bill.

Both routes are legitimate. But the home route is where the learning happens, because the feedback loop is hours rather than days. My recommendation for a first year is black-and-white film developed at home.

2. Choose black-and-white for your first fifty rolls

Black-and-white film is more forgiving, cheaper, and — crucially — you can process it yourself with three bottles of chemistry and a kitchen sink. Colour negative film needs a strictly controlled 37.8 °C process that is genuinely difficult to do well at home, and colour slide film has almost no exposure latitude at all.

The latitude point is the one people underestimate. A black-and-white negative exposed two stops under or three stops over will still produce a printable image. A slide exposed one stop over is a blank frame.

• Traditional-grain 400 speed film (Tri-X, HP5 Plus, Kentmere 400) tolerates exposure mistakes and pushes beautifully.
• A 100 speed film (FP4 Plus, Delta 100, Acros) has finer grain and forces you to think about light.
• Start with one film and stay with it for twenty rolls. Changing films constantly means you never learn what your mistakes look like.

3. Pick a camera that does not fight you

A camera is a light-tight box with a shutter. Everything else is convenience. What you want for a first camera is a working shutter at all speeds, a meter that agrees with a modern one, and a lens that is not scratched. What you do not need is a rare model, a collector's item, or anything described as "mint".

Spend the money on a service, not on rarity. A $150 camera with a $100 service will outperform a $250 camera that has never been opened.

4. Learn one exposure triangle and stop reading about it

Aperture, shutter speed and ISO interact in exactly one way, and once you have internalised it you will never need to think about it again.

• Opening the aperture one stop (f/8 → f/5.6) doubles the light reaching the film. You must halve the time to compensate.
• Doubling the ISO (400 → 800) doubles the film's sensitivity. You must halve the time or stop down.
• The three move together. Change one and you compensate with another.

What to ignore

You do not need a darkroom to start. You do not need a medium format camera. You do not need to shoot slide film to "learn properly". You do not need the sharpest lens ever made — most beginner softness is focus error, not optics. And you do not need to shoot a hundred rolls before you are allowed to develop your own film.

You need one camera, one film, one developer and a lot of rolls. Everything else is a distraction dressed up as progress.

Your first month, concretely

1. Buy one working 35mm camera and one 50 mm lens.
2. Buy ten rolls of the same 400 speed black-and-white film.
3. Shoot all ten rolls. Note the exposure for every frame.
4. Buy a tank, a changing bag, D-76, stop bath and fixer.
5. Develop them all. Keep a written record of every roll.
6. Print or scan and compare. The frames that failed will teach you more than the ones that worked.

The fastest way to learn photography is to make a lot of bad photographs quickly, and to know exactly why each one is bad.