San Marcos Film Lab is the perfect jumping off point for a family film photography journey…
What’s Old Is New Again
Since I was a teenager, I’ve always taken photos. I grew up in a time that was transitioning away from film photography and into digital. Other than your typical one-use film camera, I’d never touched a film camera until this year.
Pictures have always been important for me. In the way some people might keep souvenirs to remind them of things, I’ve always taken pictures. Digital photography was perfect for me because I could keep as many “memories” as I wanted. There was no need to develop film or deal with printing and photobooks.
Am I a Hipster?
Yet in spite of a lifetime spent as a purely digital photographer, I found myself browsing eBay for cheap film rangefinders. Sure, they look amazing, and goodness knows they look great on Instagram, but I had no intention of posting photos there. Not even photos of my camera, so what was the point?
Digital photography is better than film photography. Let’s get that out of the way. It’s easier. It’s cheaper. The photos are of higher quality and far easier to use and manipulate. It also has fewer limits. I realized that for me, digital photography would always have its place, but it had gotten boring. It was my default easy mode.
Fear and Photographs
There was one more reason I was looking at film cameras. Electromagnetic pulses. Does that seem a bit extreme? Maybe, but whether it’s some terrorist attack or a solar flare, the odds of some disaster that fries not only my hard drives but also the servers my photos are backed up on isn’t zero.
There was a show from way back in 2012 called “Revolution” that stuck in my mind. It wasn’t an amazing show per se, but it had an interesting premise. The basic concept was that, for reasons unknown, electricity had stopped working all around the world, plunging civilization back into the 1700’s.
There was a woman who, even fifteen years after the event, still carried her cell phone with her. The only pictures that she had of her now gone daughter were on that phone. They were right there, but she had no way of turning it on.
The thought of losing access to a lifetime of memories with my kids was enough to make me at least consider adding a more analog approach to my photography kit.
Local Film Lab in San Marcos
And that long-winded intro brings me to San Marcos Film Lab. If I was going to shoot film, I really wanted to support a local business to get it developed. My first thought was to go to Walgreens or CVS. The more I looked though, the worse those options appeared.
Not only are their scans of your film subpar, but they also destroy your film negatives. Why would that matter? Well, when your film is developed, it’s scanned and you’re given a digital file. However, if you don’t have the negatives, then you don’t have a physical version of your original photo anymore, and for me that’s half the point.
Then I stumbled onto San Marcos Film Lab. Not only would they do scans at high quality by default (some places charge extra), but they let you keep your negatives as well. On top of that, if you want to have prints made at the same time they can do that too.
Film Firsts at San Marcos Film Lab
My first roll of film was some Ilford HP5 plus black and white. I’d heard black and white was more forgiving, and it was a bit cheaper, so it seemed like the best place to start to test my “new” fifty year old Canon Canonet GIII QL.
I’d had to replace the light seals on the camera, which meant there was a chance that the entire first roll would be a blown-out waste if I had done it wrong. I shot through a roll in a few days and drove up to San Marcos, hoping that I’d not end up with 24 pure white images.
The shop itself is unassuming. It’s tucked in next to a record shop in downtown San Marcos. Adding to the retro vibes, they also have VHS films available for you to browse. My kids were fascinated by a physical copy of The Nightmare Before Christmas.
The man at the counter was friendly, and the shop was surprisingly busy. Apparently I wasn’t the only one who found themselves drawn back to an old medium. I filled out the little paper I was handed indicating what I wanted developed, whether I wanted to save my negatives, get prints, or allow them to potentially post an image from my roll on their Instagram.
Snap Happy
I drove home and waited for the result. A surprisingly short time later, I got a WeTransfer email with the digital copies of the photos ready for download. I opened the first one and breathed a sigh of relief. Instead of a blown out image, there was a beautiful photo of my daughter squeezing her eyes shut as my wife sprayed her hand with the garden hose.
I flipped through the photos and couldn’t believe how many were “keepers”. Something about the difficulty and permanence of shooting with film had made me take more care and thought with my photos than I would if I was just pulling out my phone, or even my FX30.
I’ve developed several more rolls of film at San Marcos Film Lab now. I’ve played with color film at different ISOs to see what I could get, and every time I’ve had that same surprise of how many good photos I’ve gotten because of the limitations I was working with.
If you too care to dip your toe into film photography, I highly recommend you give San Marcos Film Lab a try if you’re local. If you’re not, then find a local place you can support! I’d love to hear about your own experience in the comments.
BTW, all the photos in this post (minus the one of my film camera for obvious reasons) were shot on film and developed at San Marcos Film Lab. I think the results speak for themselves!
