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Analog Photography: The Beginner’s Guide to Film Cameras (2025)

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We'll start with color film, which comes in two flavors, positive and negative.

Positive Film vs. Negative Film

Positive film records the image as you saw it when you pushed the shutter. It produces rich, saturated colors and tends to have strong contrast. It's much less forgiving in my experience. You need to get the exposure right and there's not much you can do about it after the fact if you don't. I tend to avoid high-contrast scenes with positive film (or use graduated neutral-density filters to reduce contrast). Positive film is usually mounted as slides when you have it professionally developed.

Negative film records the opposite of what you saw. In black and white, everything is reversed, blacks are white, and whites are black so that when you shine light through it to print, the black areas hold back the light, making them lighter in the print, and light areas let more light through, rendering them dark in the print. The same is true of color negative film, but it tends to look more like a yellow-orange mess as a negative. Negative color film often has a softer look than color positive, with lower contrast, and higher dynamic range.

Which should you use? I suggest experimenting to see which you like the best. Below are a few film recommendations based on the type of images you want to make.

Best Film for Landscapes

Best Overall

Fujifilm's Fujichrome Velvia 50 is ridiculously expensive at $35 per roll, but I've still yet to find any other color-positive film that looks as good as Velvia. Its color saturation is legendary (tending toward the red/magenta), and its neutral gray balance means you almost never get weird colors in shadows and highlights. The price means I don't shoot it very often, but when I'm heading out into the wilderness, this is what I bring.

Runner-Up

Kodak's E100 is a new film for me, but I've shot a few rolls now, and I can say that it is very different from Velvia. There's none of the Velvia warmth; colors are rather neutral with a mild green cast to the highlights. If you're looking to shoot landscapes with a different look than the past 50 years of Velvia-influenced images, this is the film I'd recommend.

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