3 holiday gift tips for film photographers in 2021

FILM

First tip is giving the gift of their favorite film. We highly recommend filmphotographystore.com. The people over at the FPP are great. They have a great selection of film, but sometimes especially recently, color negative film is running a little bit low in stock and on occasion it can be hard to find, and which is a bummer, but that’s a great opportunity to try something different, to get them something that they haven’t shopped before, like say a black and white film, like Triax 400 or HB5. Say they love Triax 400, you could get them a bunch of it and stock them up for a while or say they haven’t shot black and white in a while, the FPP offers black and white film samplers with a variety of black and white films. So you could get them that, and they could just shoot a bunch of different film, have fun with it and see which black and white film they like most.

All the film that I’m showing you right now, I’ve recently got in the past month from filmphotographystore.com. So they have a really good selection, including a bunch of 120 films. So say the person that you’re shopping for shoots medium format. Right now they currently have Loma 100, Lomo 400 and Lumo 800 in 120. I love this film. This would be a great gift. I would love to get this as a gift as well.

CAMERA

So next is a camera or camera gear. You could get them an actual camera itself. For instance, my wife got me this Rollie 35 over six years ago back when we were dating. She knew nothing about film photography but wanted to get me something that I didn’t have. And she just Googled cool cameras and came across this Rollie 35, thought it was cool, because it was so compact and different from anything I had. And this is a camera I never would have gotten myself. But since she got it, I love it. I have other cameras that I shoot more with than this one, but this is a camera that has so much sentimental value. I’ll never get rid of it because she got it for me.

So that’s something I highly recommend the people over at keh.com would be a great resource. You could tell them your budget and then talk about the person that you’re shopping for. And they’ll help you find a camera just through their little website chat that they offer. They have a lot of used gear that comes with a warranty and that’s where I buy most of my cameras as well. So I highly recommend them.

And then if the person that you’re shopping for already has a camera, say they have a Nikon body or a Canon body or whatever, you could get them a lens. And you know, that they have like say a 50mm lens. You could get them a wide-angle lens. So like this is a Nikon 24 millimeter 2.8. I got it for around a hundred bucks. So depending on what your budget is, you could get them a lens that they don’t have, or you could get them a camera strap or something like that, that they might like, a flash, KEH sells flashes. I don’t know if they should sell camera straps, but there are a lot of places out there that sell camera straps. And that would be a great gift as well to get them a nice cool camera strap.

DEVELOPMENT

So the third thing is development. You could help cover their development. And that’s where we come in. We are a traditional dip and dunk lab that does Aesics slide film, C 41 color negative film and black and white film ll in house. We develop, scan and print and we offer a digital gift card, which you can buy here. And it’s something that you can put their email in, send it to them, and then they can use it next time they make an order and it can go towards future orders as well. And not only is that really convenient, but if you spend over $50 you will get a free desktop calendar. This is our 2022 calendar, it has all new cameras with camera descriptions, and then every month has a new camera.

So if you spend over $50 on the gift card, not only will you help cover their processing, but you can also get them this cool calendar, but it gets even better. If you spend over $75, you’ll get this desktop calendar as well as a tote bag. And it’s cool because I talked about how I got this Rollie 35 as a gift many years ago for my wife. So we figured it’d be really fitting for the holidays to put it on our tote bag. It has our brand new logo, as well as our new logo on the other side. So if you spend $75 or more, you’ll get a tote bag as well as the calendar.

Give a Gift, Get a Gift!

Buy a gift card

And then if you go over $150, which would be amazing if I shoot film and got $150 credit, I’d be really excited. You will not only get the calendar, the tote bag, but you also get a dark room hat. We also sell this hat, some stickers and some different things. But yeah, if you have any questions about what to get someone who shoots film, if you want some pointers on what type of film to get, what type of camera or anything like that, feel free to send me a message in Instagram comments, I would love to help and give you some pointers.