Day 67
Friday 26thAugust 2016
Lots of problems at work today, but at least we ended in a better position than we started from. I had to chase the new film lab for my scans, otherwise tomorrow's post (27th June) would have to be delayed. I got the scans by email but had to wait until I got home to download them on to my Mac. Talk about highs and lows; it was like the anticipation of Christmas one minute descending to dreadful shock the next. The colour scans are really bad, the colours are totally off and the images are so over sharpened. The black and white scans, well they were heart breaking. This was a roll of Ilford HP5+, which has to be one of the easiest films to develop and one which I know very well from my film days. The scans show some bad water marks over the film, large lumps of dust and hairs which by now will be welded to the film and such a bad grain structure that I can only imagine they used an inappropriate developer or the chemicals were spent and should have been changed. The scans themselves are all over sharpened and very light around the edges, I'm not sure how you even do that.
So it looks like I need to find another lab or get on with setting up my own dark room. I'm rapidly coming to the conclusion that I'm not that impressed with the shots on 35mm colour negative film, overwhelmingly preferring my black and white pictures. I am also far more pleased with the shots on my Pentax 67, they just have so much character and clarity and I think I may have to shoot more with this camera for my 365 which is a bit of a problem because it is so damned heavy to carry around!