Mayfield Photo Lab offers 35mm development and scanning/digitization services in Palo Alto for the communities of Sunnyvale, Mountain View, Los Altos, Redwood City, San Mateo, San Carlos, and Belmont.

“Film isn’t dead” was something to say when it was actually pretty much dead. Film has been back for a while, but the labs aren’t. So here we are.

What’s so special about film and film cameras? Why am I trying to support something so anachronistic and obsolete?

The most refreshing aspect of chemical photography is the ability to sidestep irritations associated with digital photography and consumer tech in general. Obtuse menu systems, power-on delay, digital noise, and the anxiety-inducing time limit imposed by rechargeable batteries, that infernal Silicon Valley obsession of shoving Wi-Fi and subscriptions into everything, all of it can be ignored to enter a more intuitive and uninhibited shooting cadence with minimal barrier to entry. Oh, and beautiful colors right out of the box. That’s a plus.

Most yard sale SLR’s will open access to a library of several decades’ worth of professional grade lenses and accessories from countless manufacturers, made in such quantities that functional pieces still circulate in abundance. Rangefinders, despite their somewhat unjustified cost and derision as metrosexual fashion accessories, train the user to think about compositional depth and predictive focusing in a compact package that also just so happens to look very stylish. Those less averse to the idea of carefree automatic snapshots can explore paths of technological development that were abandoned due to perceived inconvenience or poor compatibility with early digital cameras, and now have no modern equivalent such as infrared active autofocus systems which function instantly and in total darkness, often found on totally unremarkable 80s/90s plastic brick point and shoots.

It seems like many photographers still remember and miss these advantages, or are starting to become aware of them. It might be the reason for the recent surge in new film cameras being designed and produced in a range of formats. Between the SLR’s that shoot Instax Mini, LiDAR-powered Rollei 35 remakes, Chinese snapcams re-badged by Ilford and Kodak as stopgap products, and old out-of-touch Pentax of all companies coming out of left field with a half-frame compact in 2024, film is so back.

The goal is to keep this available for you, the discerning Bay Area snapper.