So you want to start shooting film?

01Before you spend a cent

A good camera will not take good photos. The person holding it does.

A 50mm lens sits roughly where the 2x zoom on my iPhone 15 does — near enough the same field of view. So use that. Shoot everything at 2x for a week. Add a filter if you want the film look. You'll improve faster doing this than doing anything else, because you get instant feedback instead of waiting three weeks for a lab.

Two places I learned a lot from:

• Lomography — a public gallery where people post their shots along with the camera and film they used. Genuinely useful for working out which gear-and-film combos produce the vibe you're chasing. Also just good for stealing framing ideas.
• Willem Verbeeck — found his YouTube channel during Covid and it was a goldmine. Knows his stuff and the videos are a pleasure to watch. The how-tos are solid, but the real value is watching how he sets up a shot.

02One rule: fully mechanical

Fair warning, I'm biased. But every camera below runs without a battery. The only thing the battery does is power the light meter — if it dies, you lose the meter and nothing else. Guess the exposure and keep shooting.

Electronically controlled cameras are lovely until they aren't. Flat battery means the shutter doesn't fire at all, and if something on the board goes you're hunting for a repairer who still has parts. Mechanical bodies also survive a soaking far better. Nothing here is weather sealed, but a mechanical camera that gets wet will usually dry out and carry on, whereas damp electronics corrode and stay dead.

You do not need aperture priority. Fewer parts, less to break. Engineering 101.

• Pentax K1000 — bare essentials, rugged, the classic teaching camera. My top pick. Its fame has inflated the price, so look at the Ricoh KR-5 or the Sears-badged equivalents for near-identical cameras at less.
• Canon TX — heavy solid metal. Tops out at 1/500s so it can struggle in bright light with faster film, but it takes abuse better than anything I've owned.
• Olympus OM-1 — the light one. Noticeably smaller than the rest, which matters when it lives in a daypack for months.
• Nikon FM / FM2 — the tank. Priciest here, and the FM2 gets you 1/4000s if bright light bothers you.
• Minolta SRT-101 — same build quality as the Canon, usually cheaper because Minolta doesn't carry the brand tax.

One footnote: a lot of these were designed around 1.35V mercury cells that no longer exist. Modern 1.5V replacements can throw the meter off by about a stop. Not fatal — you learn the offset, or you learn Sunny 16 — but it explains a meter that reads consistently wrong rather than being broken.

03Where to actually get one

Ask your grandparents first. I asked mine expecting a no. They turned up with a bag of them.

If you don't ask, you don't get. You'd be surprised what your family has sitting in a cupboard from their own backpacking days.

• Local camera shops — you can read reviews and, more importantly, hold the thing and check it works before money changes hands.
• eBay — check seller reviews. Good for a bargain.
• Facebook Marketplace — riskier, but the deals can be incredible.

04Choosing film

Go as cheap as you can possibly get for the first few rolls. Your first roll will probably look terrible. Expect that. You'll load it wrong, or leak light into the body, or forget what you set the aperture to. All part of the fun learning experience 🙃 — and if you're lucky a couple of frames will come out great anyway.

Once the basics are automatic, spend up. Kodak Gold 200 is my go-to for that warm summer glow. Portra 400 is excellent but pricey.

I've never shot above 400. I'm a daytime photographer and night shots would be a couple of frames a roll, which isn't worth it for me. Instead I hold a phone up to the viewfinder — modern phone sensors are so good in low light that you get most of the benefit of night photography without burning fast film on it.

05For backpackers

This is the part nobody tells you before you leave.

Airport security will eat your film

There are two kinds of scanner and the newer one is the problem. The old X-ray machines were fine for anything under 800 ISO — that's where the "it's fine, I've done it heaps" advice comes from. The CT scanners replacing them fog every film at every speed, in a single pass. Kodak, Fuji and Ilford all say the same thing. So the advice your mate gave you in 2015 is now actively wrong.

• Never put film in checked luggage. Hold baggage gets hit hardest of all.
• Shoot out your roll the day before you fly. Arriving mid-roll is what causes all the drama.
• Canisters out of their boxes, into a clear ziplock. Hand it over and ask for a hand check. Being organised does most of the persuading for you.
• Carry a film leader retriever. A few dollars, weighs nothing.

Expect it to be a coin flip whether staff know what film is. I've been shouted at over a loaded camera by someone who insisted on opening it, and explaining fell on deaf ears. I rewound the roll, pulled it out, handed over the empty camera, then found a camera shop at the other end, fished the leader back out, reloaded and fired off blank frames to get back to where I'd left off. Annoying. Recoverable.

Worth seeing the damage for yourself: Lina Bessonova's scanner test compares ISOs and formats side by side, and EMULSIVE ran a CT scanner test too.

Heat is the quiet killer

Film hates heat far more than it hates cold, and the damage is invisible until you get the scans back. A camera bag on a dashboard, a tent in the sun, the top of a bus — all bad. Keep rolls in the middle of your pack rather than in an outside pocket. Colour shifts before black and white does, and faster film shifts before slower film.

The clock starts once you've shot the frame, too. Exposed film degrades faster than unexposed, so a roll you shot in week one and carried around for three months of Southeast Asian summer has had a much rougher time than the fresh rolls sitting next to it.

How many rolls to carry

Work out your shooting rate, then decide. Most people massively overestimate — a roll of 36 lasts longer than you think when each frame costs money. If you're going somewhere with a functioning film scene, carry a couple and buy more there. If you're heading somewhere rural, carry it all in. Film is heavy in bulk and it's the one thing you can't improvise a substitute for.

Getting them developed

On a normal trip I wait until I'm home. Labs price per roll, and turning up with a stack after a trip usually works out cheaper than dribbling them in one at a time on the road. It also means one lab, one look, consistent scans across the whole trip.

Somewhere hot, develop as you go. A processed negative is stable — it doesn't care how hot your pack gets. An exposed, undeveloped roll does, and it's quietly degrading the whole time you're carrying it. If you're doing a long stretch through the tropics, find a lab every few weeks, get them processed, and post the negatives and scans home or just carry the developed strips. Costs a bit more than doing them all at once. Beats losing three months of photos to a bus roof.

Shop around, and don't just use the closest place. The best labs are little shops run by people who are obsessive about it. I've had rolls come back from careless places looking like a Minecraft world 🤢 — same negatives, completely different result. In WA my go-to was Focus Pocus in Fremantle. Now I'm on the Gold Coast it's Poji Film Lab.

Always ask for your negatives back, and keep them. A lot of shops will bin or store-then-bin them if you don't say anything. This is the single most important habit in this whole essay. In ten years your hard drive will die, or the cloud account will lapse, or you'll lose the folder in a phone migration. If you still have the physical film, none of that matters — you get it rescanned for a few dollars a roll. I've had to do exactly this more than once, usually to rescue rolls that came back badly scanned the first time. The negative is the original. Everything else is a copy.

06The actual point