The internet is worthless now. The ability to locate resources with a search engine is a distant memory. Any accurate or useful information has been so many times misunderstood, poorly summarized, then warped to uselessness by Indian SEO spammers in an endless copy-paste game of telephone playing out in the “results” pages of the English-speaking web. It’s gotten so bad that people have resorted to referencing the opinions of reddit users just because the post was probably made by a human, or LLM’s that spit out semi-relevant summaries that amount to SEO-spam nonsense written in the smug tone of a confidently incorrect redditor.

This will be the page where I will dump tips, tricks, and bits of information that might be hard to come across, particularly for people who are new and don’t actually know what questions to ask, or can’t haven’t learned the lingo yet.

‘ctrl+f’ to look for relevant topics, or just read it straight through. Lingo will be in bold. Picking up new vocab is the most annoying part of taking up any pursuit.

What is film?

Film is a thin bendy sheet or strip of transparent whatever that has been slathered in light-sensitive goo. You can buy it in rolls, cassettes, cartridges, and sheets. You can buy the goo and backing separately if you really want to. No matter what shape or “format” you get it in, it will always be stored in a lightproof container. Light creates a latent image where it hits film, which is made visible and permanent through developing. This is always additive, never subtractive. You can’t “erase” and reuse photographic film like magnetic tape.

Handling, storing, transporting materials

If you don’t plan on shooting your color film for many months, keep your film away from humidity, strong light, and heat. Refrigerators and freezers can keep your film fresh past its expiration date, but always consult the manufacturer’s spec sheet for the recommended temperature range. Allow refrigerated film to reach ambient temperature before use.

Airport CT/X-ray scanners can fog or leave wavy marks on your film, and a manual inspection should be requested whenever possible when traveling through checkpoints. If there is no way around the scan, remember that duration of exposure is a factor. Put your film through the machine separately and not near anything with a particularly interesting or suspicious cross section. The operator spending 20 seconds to admire the complex inner workings of your mechanical vintage camera and then another 10 guessing if your laptop’s battery is a bomb or not might not seem like much, but it could be the difference between a slight color cast that can be edited away or ending up with gray mush.

Loading and Unloading

The exact way to load any specific camera might vary and you should consult the manual. If you are using a camera that doesn’t self-load, always keep an eye on the rewind knob while advancing the film to the first frame, and make sure it is twitching and turning as film is pulled out of cassette. This indicates that the film has engaged the camera’s sprockets and is advancing correctly.

Don’t open your camera’s back until after you have rewound the film. That will expose your film to ambient light and cook the images off most of your film. Rewinding is done with a knob, crank, or a switch-driven motor. Automatics do this with zero user input after the last shot, so just wait until the thing stops whirring before you open the camera to load a new roll.

What camera should I get?

Compact Automatics

If you’re looking for something you can carry in a pocket, a point-and-shoot from the 1980s-2000s can be had for basically nothing. The minimum (and extent) of controls you should look for is the ability to choose whether you want the flash on or not.

Lenses will either be a slow zoom with a variable aperture range typically suitable only for daylight photography without the use of a flash, or a prime lens (fixed focal length) with a larger maximum aperture. The latter type is rarer and pricier- boomers overwhelmingly preferred the mindless convenience of small-aperture zoom lenses and fully-automatic flashes over fast (large aperture) primes that rewarded the photographer for walking a few steps with superior sharpness and light-gathering ability for natural light shots at nighttime or indoors. This is reflected in the used camera market, with a cheap zoom compact being readily available for the price of a sandwich, and prime lens compacts commanding prices of hundreds or thousands of dollars- though bargains can still be had.

The amount of technology and automation in this category can vary by quite a bit. Some cameras are basically little robots that do everything except press the shutter button for you. Others require you to make inputs such as for focus or a single exposure variable. This category of camera has blurry lines and bleeds into small rangefinders and pocketable scale-focus cameras the further back in time you go, so you can pretty much pick and choose the level of control you want in a camera.

Generally speaking, a camera’s focus/exposure system is more predictable the simpler it is, and lends to a more intuitive photographic experience.

Rangefinders

Rangefinders are cameras that are focused by triangulation, but more typically by a distance scale or muscle memory in a predictive style of photography. Framing is done through a viewfinder separate from the taking lens. They are typically compact, but not always pocketable. You will want to wear this camera on a narrow strap of leather or smooth synthetic around the neck, or over the shoulder if the camera has a cloth shutter. Small but not compact, you won’t fit these in your jeans. Maybe your coat pocket with the lens collapsed. They look like the generic mental image of “a camera.”

Rangefinders are suited for a quicker pace of photography involving dynamic subjects on a human scale, and are loved for documentary/journalistic use. Great for flash. Lenses can be fixed to the camera, or interchangeable. Rangefinder lenses are typically quite small, and commonly feature finger tabs for quick focus. They’re also fucking expensive and zooms are rare/pointless. Their minimum focusing distance is typically only ~3 feet, and macro shots will be a weakness. Viewfinders will indicate framing with parallax-corrected frame lines, and will struggle to show accurate framing with lenses longer than 135mm.

SLR (Single Lens Reflex)

These cameras can be identified by a prism hump above the viewfinder and flapping mirror in front of the camera’s shutter, which allows framing and focusing through the lens. They are focused by racking the lens’s focusing ring while looking through the viewfinder at a ground glass screen until optimal focus is achieved. There may be focusing aids such as a split prism for critical focus.

SLR’s or “reflex cameras” typically have a larger form factor and typically feature interchangeable lens mounts. Their main advantage is precise framing (what you see is what you get) and their compatibility with zooms/macro/telephoto lenses, the main weaknesses of the rangefinder. This type of camera is better suited to a reactive and continuous style of photography.

They are not ideal for tracking moving subjects in ambient light or flash work, as nothing will be visible in the viewfinder during the moment of exposure. This is called “blackout.”

Viewfinder Cameras / Box Cameras / “Reloadable Disposables”

These cameras typically have 1 shutter speed, a fixed aperture, and a plastic lens with focus locked to a distance of 3~4 yards. Maybe a flash. These suck and you will be disappointed by the results. Get literally anything else.

If you’re going to buy one anyway, keep this in mind: The only exposure variable you can control is the sensitivity of the film you load. For midday sunlight, load 100 speed film. If the light changes, you’ll have to switch on a flash or change to a faster film.

What film should I buy? 100? 400? 3200? What do the numbers mean?

Film speed, represented in ASA or ISO values (but sometimes in weird units like Soviet GOST or German DIN) tells you how much light a given film needs to catch to imprint a usable latent image. Every doubling of the number represents a halving in the required amount of light. 100 film will be more than enough for a sunny day on the beach or ski slope. 400 would be the choice for a wider range of scenes, offering fine-enough grain and hand-holdable shutter speeds in low light.

Film 100~400 is the most common to find on a store shelf, as it’s the most versatile range. “Slow” specialty low sensitivity film with ASA ratings or 50, 25, 12, or even lower are available if extremely fine grain and high resolution is the goal. Ideally you would use a good tripod, a cable release, and a good lens to actually capture all that detail. “Fast” film 800 and higher would be appropriate for bar crawls and sports photography.

Avoid 24 exposure rolls, they’re just a bad deal.