Film Photography News — February 2025 Recap

☞ This is the 71st monthly Analog.Cafe Newsletter with the latest film photography lore. Sign up to get it via email on the last Tuesday of every month (it’s free).

What’s new?

New colour film from Harman (a.k.a. Ilford) dropped this month, film prices are lower than they’ve been in years, Lomography releases two new instant film cameras, their (and Ferrania’s) accounts get hacked, and ONDU Pinhole stops making pinhole cameras — to go bigger.

💛 GOLD members get to learn more about film prices in 2025, use the new Chem Log app to save money and improve image quality in their home labs, and learn about the two “top-secret” projects in this month’s newsletter.

🎁 Try GOLD free for 14 days! In this newsletter: What’s new? How to get more out of your film development chemistry. New colour film: Harman Red 125. A good time to buy film. Two new instant film cameras from Lomography. Hacked Lomography and Film Ferrania social media pages. ONDU Pinhole stops making pinhole cameras to go bigger. Latest on Analog.Cafe. Support this blog & get premium features with GOLD memberships!

How to get more out of your film development chemistry.

If you use several developers or wish to extend the life of your C-41 chemistry, you may have a problem. Chemicals expire like yogurt and exhaust like an open soda bottle. If you wash your film in something that’s no longer good, you may lose your images, or they can come out looking underexposed.

Keeping detailed notes is very important for good image quality and to avoid disasters. Paper records may work, but they are easy to lose, get wet in a lab setting, and could be hard to get organized.

Chem Log is a new app that automates and organizes your film development notes in a simple interface designed to take the least time possible. It keeps a record of all your mix dates, automatically calculates extended development times for your colour-negative film, and has a built-in dilution calculator.

Chem Log works on all devices and integrates with Film Log so that you’ll never forget which roll is in which camera and which chemicals you used for which one of your films. You can even download all your data into your spreadsheet software.

It takes a few seconds to jot a note in Chem Log and it can save you a lot of trouble in your home lab.

Get Chem Log, more premium apps, exclusive photography guides, and monthly secret features with your Analog.Cafe GOLD membership.

New colour film: Harman Red 125.

Harman, the company that makes Ilford-branded black-and-white films, released a new* colour film just in time for the Valentine’s Day celebrations this February.

Redscaling an existing emulsion isn’t particularly difficult — it’s a matter of flipping the film strip around in the canister before loading it into your camera — but not all labs will be able to process it if you do it at home.

Harman’s new product, Red 125, is their new Phoenix 200 emulsion with layers reversed but with the edge markings mirrored and a new DX code. The result is a canister that works in point-and-shoot cameras and doesn’t confuse legacy lab machines.

Because Red 125 is a redscale film, meaning it does not have a natural colour balance, there should be no difficulty scanning this film no matter the lab or software used — it will appear the right kind of red no matter what you do. You may’ve also noticed that the ISO number has also changed to 125 since the redscaled film requires more light for proper exposure.

But my favourite part of this product is the new datasheet that the company released along with it. It shows how the colour layers change their response due to new orientation and a very cool spectral sensitivity graph that looks very cool.

A good time to buy film.

Film prices are a pain point for many photographers. There are certainly ways to spend less — from bulk loading to developing and scanning at home — but it’s a rare delight to learn that the cost of shooting film has actually gone down.

I’ve been shooting film for over a decade, yet I can never guess whether the price I’m paying is fair. There are over a hundred brands of film available today, sold at changing and sometimes wildly different costs. For example, Harman Phoenix is $21 on Amazon in Canada but $11 at B&H!

Knowing the average price for a film helps. For Phoenix 200, it’s $14, which immediately reveals that Amazon is charging $5 or 36% more than the norm. But there was no stock market ticker for film when I started — which is why I built one.

I’ve been collecting prices across several stores around the world and over thirty popular film stocks since 2018. The resulting seven-year timeline of averages illustrates the effect of supply chain disruptions of the early 2020s and the continued explosion of interest in the medium as a swelling cost — up by 60% for colour film in early 2024 compared to 2019.

But in 2025, colour film is 11% cheaper than it was at its peak, which is equivalent to a 15% discount with inflation factored in.

Of course, this global price reduction on film may be hard to spot, given how confusing the prices are, but you can always refer to the Film Price Trends app to see if you’re getting a fair deal.

Whether film will become more affordable in the near future isn’t clear, but there are signs, which I discussed in this year’s first semi-annual Film Price Rreport.

Two new instant film cameras from Lomography.

Lomography released two new designs for their foldable Instax Square camera with a glass lens. What’s cool about those cameras is that they can switch to shooting Instax Mini, and they aren’t particularly expensive ($150). Learn more about these cameras here.

Hacked Lomography and Film Ferrania social media pages.

Lomography lost its Instagram page around the time its new cameras launched, while Film Ferrania’s Facebook page is still in the hands of scammers.

For Lomography, this meant resetting their account and starting from zero, but it’s unclear whether Ferrania will be able to get theirs back. From what I’ve heard, restoring ownership is not straightforward or even possible in some cases. But I think it would be good for the team to get their handle back, as the current situation has already fueled at least one rumour about them going out of business.

ONDU Pinhole stops making pinhole cameras to go bigger.

Running a successful business is difficult. Even if the idea and all the work that went into making it a reality pays off, expanding a complex operation can cause countless sleepless nights and lead to a disaster if done wrong.

Building pinhole cameras on the level Elvis of ONDU Pinhole has achieved is complicated. But in recent years, his firm has expanded to large format cameras, which added a lot of pressure to his operations, as he explains in this week’s video update.

Earlier this month, he announced that ONDU will stop making pinhole cameras — which came as a shock to some. That’s not due to the lack of interest, of course. The sales generated from the latest batch are fueling the large format camera line production, which Elvis promised to his backers after successful funding in 2023.

Elvis admitted in the above video that the response that he’s got from his customers about the pinhole cameras has been overwhelmingly positive and encouraging. Yet the decision was made to make his and his team’s lives easier with fewer product lines to maintain. Here’s his email response to my request for clarification:

— Elvis (quote published with permission).

When I asked Elvis about his future plans, “Are there any new releases planned for this year, and is it just LF you’re looking at for the foreseeable future?” he shared his ambition to go even bigger.

— Elvis.