Introducing: GOLD Memberships

The new GOLD memberships are an affordable way to learn more about film photography, use new tools to do it better, and support Analog.Cafe in the meantime.

Over the past few years, some of you donated and even pledged monthly contributions to help maintain and grow this blog. I appreciate it very much and I am happy to finally offer something extra in return as a way to say “thanks!”

The GOLD memberships are the new ongoing project that I hope to grow into a library of high-quality tutorials, apps, and website features for film photographers.

The first premium article is all about saving money on film with insights worth a lot more than five bucks (GOLD membership fee), in my opinion.

Next month, I’ll publish a course on estimating exposure by eye in any light conditions. Premium content downloads you can keep forever (like PDFs) are coming shortly after.

You can become a GOLD member and get access to this course and every consequent course and feature for $5/month.

First premium article on Analog.Cafe to help photographers save money on film.

There are hundreds of film brands to choose from. It’s nearly impossible to tell whether you’re getting a good deal either — your favourite roll will almost certainly be priced differently at various locations.

Since 2018, I’ve been tracking film prices across a number of popular shops for dozens of key stocks. The data I collect powers a tool that helps thousands of photographers make better buying decisions.

Each time I update the data, I share my insights (like this one) for free. I am still doing that; however, GOLD members will get a little extra help this year:

For the first time, I’m sharing the data I got from all of the shops on all the films directly.

If you have the membership, you’ll immediately see which shop has the best price on your favourite film and which films have the best deals at your favourite shop.

For example, the chart here shows a potential $13 in savings across shops.

This data doesn’t include every shop on the planet that sells film. But it can certainly help you make better decisions at the counter, which means more film for you!

Analog.Cafe is not going to be paywalled.

I understand that paywalls and other restrictions go against the spirit of openness many of us appreciate and benefit from online. Analog.Cafe is free to read regardless of location or budget, and it will remain as such for the majority of its content.

However, I also made a choice not to allow third parties to publish slow, distracting, privacy-invading ads on Analog.Cafe. On top of that, I fancy the best web technology on the planet to serve you 4K images on the fastest networks, which costs money and my time as a web developer.

The GOLD membership is a compromise that I hope gives a little extra back to those of you who decide to support this blog without taking away from the free & ad-free publication I’ve been running for nearly six years.

Refreshed web design.

In addition to the new GOLD content portal and everything that supports it, I’ve made a few changes that should benefit everyone using this blog:

I updated the accent font on this website to cursive writing. I’ve also improved the legibility of the article subtitles (like the one above) with the serif font design.

I simplified how lists of articles look on this website. Previously, I had a custom SVG mask cover article images to make it appear as if they were printed on a piece of 35mm film. The images even got inverted when you clicked a post. However, as a long-time user of this website, I finally realized that this elaborate design is somewhat distracting and limiting in terms of how and how large I can display the images.

I added “trending” articles to the homepage so that there’s something new and interesting to discover each time you visit. Trending articles refresh every 10 minutes.

I rewrote large parts of Analog.Cafe website to load 20% faster. I did my best not to introduce any new bugs, but I’ve changed over 2,000 lines of code — so please let me know if anything goes awry!

Your feedback.

I don’t think I’d keep writing or put as much effort into making a pretty website for this long if it weren’t for you, the reader.

Your opinion matters to me. Please share if you got one in the comments: