Ya, there are tons of Silver recycling places or just take the fixer solution down to walmart and they recover the silver, and the rest is harmless. every looked at the ewaste problem, with your computer, which is not really recyclable, and all the water it takes to make a CPU or memory chip? and all that associated energy? They can only process escrap in china and other low cost areas because it is mainly plastic and low grade steel. all the American “recyclers” do is just chop it up and send it overseas to be smelted. think of the nasty bunker fuel a cargo ship burns taking you junk over to china. and then think of a 30 yr old camera, being passed around or sold with no circuit boards, you could throw that right into land fill w. no problem. Same idea with the prius’s all that nickel and lithium mined and shipped around the world to make batteries. and then you have to recycle them and buy a new one for 10k, real economical and environmentally friendly.

Start thinking holistically where basic materials come from and you will see that all this green stuff isn’t really green at all. Wind turbine? where do you think the steel comes from? and the water used?

you are not a “pro”
you mainly take pics when you are traveling
You are selective in what you print.

So here is the math;

medium format camera
bronica s2a kit w. 75m lens & back- 390
med. format projector- 400
scanner – 250
light meter- 130
_____________
$1170

Bsically using the scanner to “proof” what ones you want to print.

Then for film & dev. not inc. printing, I don’t know how many prints a person wants to make.

say 15 220 rolls a yr.= 360 pics a yr. or 1800 pics in 5 yrs.

dev. 220 roll- $9.00

or $675 for 5 yrs.

Film cost- $6 a roll or $450 for 5 yrs.

so $1125 for 5 yrs.

total= $2295

Or $0.78 a shot.

Digital;

Canon EOS 5D Mark II- $3000
Lens Canon EF 50mm f/1.4 USM Lens- $469
Lexar Platinum II 60x SDHC – 32GB- $169
Lightroom software- $299

__________________________________

TOTAL; $3937

Say you shoot 3x as much (5400) so $0.73 a shot
To get that down to almost free say sub 5 cents a shot, that would mean 80,000 shots, most digital cams are only rated for 10k shots. lets assume that you can, and you go out every weekend and you get 14 days vacation, so 118 days and maybe a week at xmas so 125 days a yr. That’s 480 pictures a day.
or the equiv. of 13.3 rolls of film a day. Sorry I do not live in that exciting of a place.

Or slightly more realistic, 10k shots in 5 yrs, what the manuf. is rating the camera for. Still 34 cents a shot. Just the body, card & software, and you keep the lens.

But in 5 yrs, if you want to sell the system with film I think you may get close to what you paid, less the film costs.

With digital, the software is super old now (5yrs) and the memory stick is probably toast, if it is not there is no market to sell it.

the digital body, is now ancient, who wants to buy a 5 yr. old camera, they will probably have 30mp point & shoots in 5 yrs.

Weight? I think the bronica is about 1800g and the canon is around the same with the lens.Or pretty close.

cost? when you factor in that your 3 grand investment is gone in 5 yrs. maybe you can recover $500 from that…. Unlimited shooting, well that’s great but I shoot digital too and most of the shots are grab shots or snap shots, nothing really I want to hang on my wall.

I tend to overshoot with digital, and I have gotten some great shots but I look back on them and I wish that I had a better digital because I can see its not matching film.

Convenience? with digital absolutely, but with film your costs are over 5 yrs. and you only pay when you develop and shoot.

It’s fun to have a slide show. maybe it’s just me, but I loved when I was a kid and going over to peoples houses and seeing a slide show of all the great places your parents friends went. I even like the sounds associated with film and slide projectors.

I say buy a film camera, the pics will still look great in 100 years, and still photography will be replaced with hi-res video stills.

Basically shoot film while you can, because you may not have the option in a couple of years time.
Eventually digital will replace film, and I think it would be kind of cool to have a 100mp, super HD infrared, heat sensing camera hooked up to my retina. But that time is not yet.

Lee

As far as dissolved silver content, if one is throwing it down the drain, the actual silver content is rather minute and unless you and all your neighbors are processing film its not enough to really worry about. That is not to say that it should be done. Most cities, townships and couties have household hazardous waste disposal sites, call your local government to find out about such locations near you. Clearly mark the containers with the used contents and usually you need to include a content information sheet or MSDS for the center to properly process your waste. Disposal is usaully done at little to no coust.

As far as digital being better for the envronment, knowing industrial electronics production and knowing some of the materials in DSLRs and point and shoots, there is plenty of environmental waste, which has to be processed by the manufacturer. Not to mention trace residues of lead and heavy metals in the circuitry itself, and chemicals that are used to strip precious metals out of circuit boards.

Plus when you consider the electricity used by your computer for procesing digital shots, recharging your camera, waste produced by production of ink jet materials and the litium ion batteries in both your camera and laptops, and the environmental effects when these find their way to the garbage 10 years from now; it could be argued that there is more waste and damage being done through the modern methods than would be done by the average darkroom photographer using the old chemical ways.

Again, the environmental side has plusses and minus for both sides of the coin. But I would point out that if photography was so detrimental to the environment, we would hear much more about its impact. Aside from the NYC papers dumping their chems directly into the Hudson back in the 30′s and 40′s.

In short, be responsible, but don’t feel that you are doing the environment any favors by going all digital. YOu are still hurting in other ways.

It could be said that with digital photography the environmental costs are up front. I haven’t looked into how safely all these cameras are being made. How the millions of cameras themselves are being disposed of is another point. The pressure to continually upgrade is enormous and what happens to the outdated cameras?

Most photographers I’ve talked with ‘feel’ that digital photography is less harmful to the environment. I hope that they are right.