Back in the day, when I used to use film cameras as a kid, I learned everything I ever needed to know about photography from my father. It was really very simple and went something like this:

1. Just use any 100 ISO film. It doesn’t matter which one and don’t worry about any of that fancy 400 ISO stuff.
2. Just use whatever lens came with your (second-hand) camera, you don’t need any of those other ones.
3. Don’t worry about the meter, it’s probably broken and we haven’t got a battery anyway. If it’s really sunny, use ƒ8 or ƒ11. If the weather is overcast, use ƒ3.5 to ƒ5.6. If it’s any darker, it probably won’t come out anyway, so don’t worry about it.
4. Always shoot at 1/125 shutter speed.

I may be dramatising that slightly for effect but, to be quite honest, growing up in grey rainy England, that pretty much worked just fine. Especially with black and white film.

Point number 1, film brand, is the most interesting to me nowadays. When I started getting back into film photography, I bought all sorts of different types of film stock. I’d read online discussions about how certain films had different characteristics, were easier to scan, or develop, what their ‘real’ ISO speed was and so on. And I have no reason to doubt much of this. I don’t develop my own negatives and no idea how different chemicals change the characteristics of different films.

Also, I don’t wet print films. So, apart from the obvious differences in grain between slower and higher speed films, my main concern is how each film scans and how much digital post-production I can do to it, without it going horribly wrong. And subjectively, I have found some films easier to work with digitally than others.

However, after having three images printed recently for a project – all taken with different 400 ISO films brands – I realised that there was no way in which anyone would be able to tell what charectoristics might have been different, had I used a different film for each photo. In fact, they could easily have been taken on the same day (they were not) as part of a set.

This probably won’t make me stop buying different types of film. It’s fun to experiment and there probably are slight differences, when it comes to the genre of photographic project. But, I suspect that the difference probably doesn’t boil down to all that much.