From a purely financial point of view, this doesn't make sense, but as I'm getting tired of reading about new revolutionary cameras that I "must" have to stay competitive, I went back to my Nikon F6 and Fuji GX680 to shoot a few rolls of film, mostly Portra 160 and 400. When I received the results back from the lab, I was struck by the quality of the output and the fact that at 6-10MP, they looked as good as or better than any digital file, but with the big difference that colours, contrast etc. look great straight out of the box.

So I would like to shoot some film for stock too, just for the satisfaction of doing it, and because there is actually something called "film look". Yes, I know there are plugins available for this, and yes, I know that would be cheaper, but it's not nearly as fun.

Has anybody submitted film shots to microstock lately and had it accepted?

From a purely financial point of view, this doesn't make sense, but as I'm getting tired of reading about new revolutionary cameras that I "must" have to stay competitive, I went back to my Nikon F6 and Fuji GX680 to shoot a few rolls of film, mostly Portra 160 and 400. When I received the results back from the lab, I was struck by the quality of the output and the fact that at 6-10MP, they looked as good as or better than any digital file, but with the big difference that colours, contrast etc. look great straight out of the box.

So I would like to shoot some film for stock too, just for the satisfaction of doing it, and because there is actually something called "film look". Yes, I know there are plugins available for this, and yes, I know that would be cheaper, but it's not nearly as fun.

Has anybody submitted film shots to microstock lately and had it accepted?

You must have a lot of time at hand...

Here's an interesting comparison of flatbed versus drum scanning

http://www.simonkennedy.net/blog/architectural-photography-2/4x5-flatbed-vs-drum-scan/

You have to scan the trannies or prints and pref drum-scan!  not a cheap service unless you have your own drum!

I live in Bangkok, and professional, high quality scans are not too expensive here. Processing plus scanning up to 8 or 10 MP is usually around $15. Add $10 for a high quality film like Portra, so I'm at around $0.70 per image. It will never be as cheap as digital of course, but it's not as bad as it sounds. A typical shoot with a model easily costs $200 or more plus my time which I would value at $200 too for a day. Adding 8 rolls of film, 290 exposures for another $200 is not what's going to break my economy, and I save some of it by spending less time post processing.

At any shoot, I'd probably do 70-80% digital, but since I tend to be more elaborate when shooting film, the keepers will probably more like 50/50.

Still, I don't know what the agencies will say because, even if there will be no visible grain in the images, a trained eye will see that it's film, particularly when I use 35mm. Medium format should be problem free, but that ads to the cost, since there's only 9-16 images per film at the same cost per roll.