How Big Is Film Photography?

Has anyone ever asked you whether they still make film today?

It’s no secret that film photography is a niche, but I’ve always wondered how niche. Unlike the digital camera sale figures, film usage and production stats are murky, and the social signals are inconsistent.

On one hand, my social media, email inbox, and personal communications revolve around film photography. I’m still in awe of Kodak’s multi-billion dollar film production facilities and the Polaroid factory. But on the flip side, most people who don’t live in this world look puzzled when I tell them that film is still relevant.

So which is it?

This month, I ran some rough numbers to find out how much film is being made and sold today and how many people may be shooting it globally.

✪ Note: The dollar figures mentioned here are US currency. In this letter: The data. Insights and data visualization. How many people are there shooting film in 2024? And how much? Current & upcoming projects. Support this blog & get premium features with GOLD memberships!

The data.

Once I launched this blog back in 2017, film photography began to take a significant chunk of my time and dollars. And yet, I could never tell if the price I paid for film was fair. Even after all the discontinuations, there was (and still is) a lot of choice, and it’s all priced differently (for example, the cheapest roll was around $3 and the priciest was $20 in 2019). There’s no way all those numbers could stay in my head so I began writing them down.

Of course, noting the film prices from just one store isn’t particularly insightful, so I surveyed a few. I tried to stay away from places like Amazon, which often sold film at inflated prices — the stores I chose had to have a decent, overlapping selection of film.

My first survey covered prices of 36 35mm/36exp. film stocks sold at Adorama, Analogue Wonderland, Buy Film Canada, BH Photo, Film Photography Store, Freestyle Photo, Macodirect, and Walmart.

Once I finished with the spreadsheet, I made the first app that cataloged all the films and listed an average price for each. I called it Film Price Tracker and I used it every time I bought film. This helped me support my local shops and myself by picking stocks that were priced below or near the market average.

Others found it useful, too; the app was favourited and shared several times. I’ve had reporters approach me about it privately, and it was quoted in a few YouTube videos on the subject.

Insights and data visualization.

Each survey takes about two hours to complete, as I copy-paste numbers from various stores in four currencies. Because the prices typically do not change very often, I limited my store surveys to one every six months. Still, that was enough for certain trends to emerge as the years went by.

Since I sampled all of the major film brands sold in the most popular format (35mm) across prominent film photography stores, it was easy to reduce those numbers to reliable average figures. I found those figures insightful in a few different ways:

1) Kodak, Fujifilm, and Ilford’s announcements about price hikes are not immediately consequential to how much we pay for film. It can take six months or longer for the sellers to change the price tag, which is a perfect opportunity to stack up on that film and keep our own price per roll constant for years in spite of the news.

2) Film prices are exceptionally volatile. They differ by as much as 50% between shops (which sometimes has something to do with the shops’ home country or region), and they can go up (and down!) by as much in just a few months. This was the case with CineStill 50D, which Macodirect sold for $11.59 in December 2019, then $16.63 in April 2020, then $14.30 in July 2021.

But spreadsheets aren’t particularly fun or beautiful to work with, so I built another app that you and I can use for even more interesting insights.

This month, I implemented fancy graphing software and reformatted my data to work with the new Film Price Trends web app. The app plots prices in a currency of your choice between December 2019 and August 2024 as averages. Those averages are calculated for various stores, film types (colour vs. black-and-white), and the general trend (an aggregate of all films across all stores).

Here’s what I found while playing with the graphs thus far:

3) Colour and black-and-white film prices trend in the same direction, but they can also diverge. For example, colour film is 3.77% cheaper in August 2024 compared to January 2024, but black-and-white film is 2.5% more expensive.