By Rohan Mattu
Baltimore Watchdog Staff Writer
Digital photography has killed film forever.
Or has it?
“If people grow up on digital and then they come to this film thing they’re like, ‘Cool, I have to wait for something,’” said Brian Miller, owner of Full Circle. “The majority of younger people haven’t had an analog experience in photography, so it’s something completely new to them.”
Full Circle Fine Arts is a photo imaging service that has been operating in Baltimore since 1987. The business witnessed a firsthand the rapid uptick in analog photography within the past decade.
“When I came in 2010 we might get one roll a week of color. There just wasn’t a lot because people were shooting digital,” Miller said. “We went from one roll a week in 2010 to hundreds of rolls a week. Last year we processed 7,000 rolls of color film.”
The upward trend in analog photography is not only apparent in film labs, but in higher education as well.
As a lecturer in photographic imaging and art history as well as the print center and darkroom coordinator at Towson University, Liz Donadio helps keep film alive by teaching analog techniques.
“I’ve seen over the past couple of years a pretty significant upswing in the number of students who are interested in using film, who want to use analog cameras, and who want to learn how the process works,” Donadio said.

The finite nature of film can even change the way people take photographs, suggests Donadio.
“What’s interesting to me is that you have that limit,” she said. “You have 36 pictures, so each frame has to count. So, you slow down a lot, you take your time, and it makes you see the world differently because of that.”
Donadio says another thing that might draw students to analog photography is a poignant quality that digital photography lacks.
“To be able to watch a print develop before your eyes and to hold it, there’s something very human about that, to have that tangible process,” Donadio said.
Emma Cheshire, a photography major in her junior year at the Maryland Institute College of Art, began her analog journey when she took a black and white darkroom class in high school. She soon fell in love with film photography.
“I felt like I was finally able to truly express myself in a really special way,” she said.
“I love the feeling, the process, and the need to slow down and really concentrate on your subject with film because it’s money and of course you want to do it right,” said Cheshire. “There are certain elements of film photography that you cannot replicate with digital. It’s truly unique.”
Richard Pence, a photography major in his senior year at Towson University, began his analog journey through a film photography class in community college. Today, Pence home develops his film in multiple formats, and even utilizes laser cutters to build his own analog cameras.
“I find that I take my time more and appreciate it more in a lot of different ways when I’m using film,” said Pence. “At this point I only bring out my [digital] cameras when I really need them, for projects and stuff like that.”

It is not only those studying photography who take up film photography either.
Pocholo Itona, an advertising major in his junior year at Towson, has been teaching himself analog processes outside of the classroom, through the internet.
“There’s a lot of resources on the internet to choose from,” Itona said. “You don’t really need a classroom to learn film when you have YouTube and your photographer friends.”
One might think that this revival is a result of clever marketing by a dying industry, but that is far from the case.
“The photo and film industry has done almost nothing to encourage this whole movement in film, it has been user initiated,” Miller said.
Large websites and forums like Instagram and Reddit can be credited in part with popularizing the analog movement. The analog subreddit community has over 400,000 subscribers, and the 35mm hashtag has over 19 million posts on Instagram. In these communities, photographers of all calibers post, teach, and learn about film photography.
Photo companies have begun to respond to consumer demands. Kodak resurrected one of its most popular films, Ektachrome, in 2018. The film was discontinued in 2013, a year after Kodak filed for bankruptcy.
When the venerable Ilford Photo company conducted a global film users survey in 2018, they found continued growth in new film users from the same study in 2014. According to their website, Ilford Photo introduced their new Simplicity line of film developing products as a direct response to these results.
The Simplicity developing chemicals come in premeasured sachets and are marketed to those who are new to home developing. Products like this that ease the learning curve of analog photography might encourage even more new photographers.
“What this survey has reiterated is that the appeal of film is enduring and will continue to grow as more and more people (re)discover it,” said Ilford Photo on its website.
1 Comment
Thank you for keeping the faith and promoting real photography.