Originally posted by just_another_gymbro 1. Does anyone have any experience doing the "full stack" of 35mm shooting? ie. Everything from buying bulk film with a loader, to at-home development and scanning. Where do you think I should upgrade first? Should I start by at-home scanning and bulk film and go to a lab for development? Or should I start by at-home development and not worry about scanning?
Having re-read your initial post, I realised I hadn't responded on this point - and it's one I have some recent experience with, so feel I might offer some potentially-useful insight.
Having gone through the same journey you're planning a few months back, I decided to set up a digitising rig first. My reasoning was that film development is still relatively inexpensive if you look around for good hobbyist-oriented labs, but scanning to decent resolutions is pretty expensive everywhere. Plus, depending on the lab used, you may have zero or very little input on the level and style of processing in the scans provided. Some will offer you completely flat, untouched scans - which is great, as it leaves you to do any post-processing work yourself... exposure, tone curve, contrast, shadows / highlights. But most have their own ideas of how customer's photos should be processed, and that's what you get whether you like it or not. Lastly, some labs only provide JPEGs, whilst others provide TIFFs at extra cost. JPEGs are fine, but you obviously lose quite a bit of information from the digital image due to compression, and if you plan on doing further optimisation or editing yourself, this should be a consideration. By doing your own digitising at home, you reduce the cost per film significantly and gain full control over the style and quality of the scans, and with a DSLR-based rig you get raw files to work with. Nice
Once you're happy with the digitising aspect, I'd move on to developing film next. I've only developed a handful of films thus far, as I've been busy with other projects too (especially recently). It's quite daunting the first time, but members here have been extremely helpful in guiding me, and it turns out to be not
that difficult to get at least a useable result, so long as your photos were reasonably exposed to begin with. One thing I would say is, it's quite easy to over-equip yourself for home developing, and I've been guilty of that myself - however most of the items needed are relatively inexpensive, so even if you do end up buying items you subsequently don't need or use, the costs are fairly insignificant.
Both home developing and digitising have proven extremely satisfying for me, but developing in particular feels almost magical
Bulk loading is something I've looked at, but unless you're going to be shooting an awful lot of film (of the same type) and shooting it very regularly, I'm not sure the benefits outweigh the cost of entry and effort required... That said, I'd love to give it a try some time, just to have the experience