There really has been a resurgence of people craving a more tactile experience. I've been enjoying shooting on 35mm film again recently. I've realized that I've never really covered the basics on this channel. I recommend you start with color negative film as it's the most forgiving and it has beautifully soft colors. Right now the best advertising for us is what our customers say and how much they like our products. I've just been walking around shooting photos with these guys. It's a good time to be a film photographer. I brought my Shen House 6x17 Kodak Portrait Time. So social media is a great friend of ours and it's helped revive this analog application of film. Search for the hashtag, film is not dead on Instagram. And you'll find over 14 million posts from users all over the world. So why in a world where it's so easy, quick and cheap to take the perfect photo with our cell phones are younger generations embracing a slower process. Why are film and vintage camera cells skyrocketed? This is 900,000. And how has an online community helped revitalize the analog photography industry? Thanks for watching. I'll see you next time. Music That's Willem. He's 20 years old and he makes a living with his YouTube channel where he talks exclusively about film photography. This week I'm making a video about the Canon A1 which is a 35 millimeter film camera that I picked up a couple weeks ago and have been fun. This is real life, this is how it goes. Not a good talk, isn't it? YouTube kind of became my full time job without me trying it. I definitely started YouTube and just was doing it for fun and unintentionally it started bringing in money through different ads and sponsors. I'd say every month is somewhere from 5 to 15,000 more subscribers. So this is the lifetime subscriber growth and you can see that every little peak is when I upload a video. So the majority is 18 to 24 and 25 to 34. That's pretty good. I'm happy about that. Young people. The photo walk is one of the most popular type of videos on Willem's channel. And they're actually pretty satisfying. The audience basically tags along as he shoots several rolls of film. So many kids who were born 15, 20 years ago. For a lot of their life like myself didn't have that experience of tactile records or cameras that you actually have to put something into and develop. And ironically I think social media has just had a really big impact in the way that film photography especially over the last five years with Instagram has kind of spread and people have found it. And they like the look of it and then they look into it and they go, oh I want to try that. The last roll of the day. It's very expensive to get photos developed. It's very expensive to buy film. And even the cameras are still expensive too. But at the end of the day that just brings a lot of genuine people together. What's up guys? This is Matt Day and this is the very first episode of the film show. It was about five and a half years ago that I started my YouTube channel. And the biggest reason was mostly just to fill a void. I couldn't find a channel that had just information on film stocks and film cameras. And you know for a younger generation they've never shot film before and this is fascinating to them. I've just been walking around shooting photos with these guys and we are never all in the same place at once. You can enjoy some of the photos and just us hanging out shooting photos. I wasn't expecting the growth of the film photography community or anything. But I definitely encourage it. Well I got up early this morning to come out and take pictures but I had no idea where I was going to go. Nick Carver's YouTube channel is another popular one. I definitely have noticed it is a younger crowd watching the videos. There must be a pretty big burnout on just how intangible their world is. I think everyone kind of wrote them off as like oh they just want everything down, they want everything easy. But they've really embraced film photography much more than I expected. I mean that was unheard of five, ten years ago. Just you never get an old film camera that's ridiculous people are trying to give them away. Yeah yeah. You brought your camera. Yes I did. This is the one you used now? This is the little contact. I love this camera. Well I was thought maybe would you like me to model for you? Yeah. Yeah I told them. I'm within a week that camera had doubled in price from $400 and $400. I would say between 50 and 100 people on a given day there might be more. Be 300 bucks and this is $149. They came out with this in like the early 80s. Much better camera for wheel less money. Well that's what I'm doing. You develop it and then you scan it you know. I spend an awful lot of time talking with people about film. There are a lot of young kids because they never were exposed to it before. The only T2 I have is a black one. It's $2,000. The context T3 if you want. Here you go. $3,000. What has happened is the demand has completely exceeded the supply in a lot of cases causing the prices of some of these cameras to absolutely just be completely ridiculous. You're talking about a finite set of cameras that were made and are available and most of these are 30 to 40 years old. And so there's an awful lot of shrinkage. But there are millions of film cameras out there and chances are the last four decades to come. What's important to understand is that the analog industry is still alive because this is still alive. One of our challenges as the demand for film decrease was which products should we just continue. So the exciting reverse of that as film has been revived we started to bring some of those products back. We are making more than twice the amount of roles in 2019 than we made in 2015. And it's been a steady increase. It's gone up 15, 20, even 30% per year. So it's great for us. It's been a challenge for us but it's great for us to see that grow. That's really nice when you shoot a film for a while that you get comfortable with it. We didn't have the marketing intelligence to tell us that there was a whole new generation of people that were going to get interested in film. It's an awakening for this generation and that didn't even know what film was. Darkroom photography and analog photography treats images as individually important. And so much time and effort goes into making one that they become precious and they mean something to you and they're not disposable. While many millennials and gen seers are being introduced to analog photography through social media, others like Wesley students are drawn to the slower process in the darkroom precisely because of how overwhelmed they are by their social feeds. We don't even speak about Instagram or social media in class at all. I imagine being a kid now with everything being so instantly connected and sharing imagery or words or videos to take a moment to step back and slow down and be intentional with the camera. Yeah, I'm sure it can be a sanctuary space for a lot of kids. However, Wesley, like many others, believes that the process behind analog photography won't be sustainable in the future. As we think about the environment, film is not environmentally friendly. And the production of the film and the chemical process of the film and the water used to treat it. So yeah, I think film will eventually go away. Hopefully not. Not the next few years, but I think probably. Looking into the future, I think it is still going to be a niche kind of thing. As a whole, I don't think the majority of people have the patience for it. This composition is probably going to be best it does. The film photography community, we all have this joint goal of keeping film alive. We don't think this demand for still film is a bad that's going to go away. It's sustained itself for four years right now and the growth just seems to be accelerating. The future looks bright. Maybe our love for film goes beyond photography itself. It's more than the cameras we use or the stocks we choose. In a world where everything seems to pass us by in a split second, the process behind film photography reminds us that sometimes it's okay to slow down, to acknowledge everything and everyone around us. And to take in every moment, one frame at a time. So I'm here my favorite photo lab in Brooklyn. I love these guys. Hey guys! How many roles of films do you think you develop every day over here? Around 75 to 100. How do you guys find time to rest? You guys are always working. That minor bear? Thank you so much!