I am a 75 year-old magazine photographer and writer. I started my career in Vancouver BC in 1976. I stopped working when magazines and newspapers became moribund in Vancouver, Canada and much of the world.
When shooting for magazines, before the advent of digital and importantly scanners we had to shoot slide film (transparency is the term used sometimes when the format is bigger than 35mm). The reason for this is that magazine art/design derectors wanted to see the original. These originals had to be bang on. Pre Photoshop there was nothing much one could do with either over or under exposure. Se we used good exposure/flash meters. Few magazines tolerated the more forgiving colour negative film.
From original to magazine a process involving something called colour separations was used. Rarely were these seps of the same colour as our originals!
In order to not have to do re-shoots most of us (me especially) shot 120 film so that we could use Polaroid backs to check exposure and layout.
I have a 6x7cm Linhof slide projector with a Leitz lens. The projections are amazing. For many years those in the gardening clubs would project 35mm slides or in my case the larger ones. This sort of thing is gone. I have no reason to shoot Ektachrome. I must admit and point out that a giclée print (a well made one that uses a drum scanner) of one of my 6x7 cm Ektachromes could never have been as good with the older methods of printing slides. I never like the very glossy and high contrast Cybachrome.
I use now for my personal work a Fuji X-E1 and an X-E3. I like to take modern dance blurs (1/4, 1/8 second) at either 800 ISO or 3200 ISO. I crop out parts of legs on edge of frame, etc. I could have never been able to do this with 3200 b+w film.
But there is something that I love about film and this is the peel (colour or b+w) from the now discontinued Fuji Instant 3200 b+w and 100 colour film. The Polaroid peels were also outstanding as they did not fade like the Fuji ones do. I have quite a few boxes of the Fuji stuff left. I have Kodak 35mm b+w Infrared Film. It is very good for portraits (purple lipstick to avoid faded mouths) but the Infrared tool of my Corel Paint Shop Pro X2 is very good and you really cannot tell the difference.
I think (and here I am purely subjective) that the resurgence of film is much like the interest in Vinyl. Those who are my age remember the problems of film and the fact that records had scratches and made noise.
