I Think That I Shall Never See...

I just got my first roll of film back from Oregon Photo. I shot it with the P&S, generally choosing static subjects such as Trees. I used Kodak Max 400 film for this experiment, and as noted above, I had it developed by a 'professional' lab.

On the plus side:

• Negatives came in separate plastic sleeves.



• Each 3X5 had the negative number stenciled on the back.



• The glossies were of decent quality, crisp and bright.

On the minus side:

• Negatives had fingerprints on them before they were removed from their sleeves by me.



• Negatives have dust/hair in the developed images. Look at the first tree in from the right, foreground, in the 'Forest' picture, near the bottom branches -- in the original negative scan there is a hair which is huge, though thank Ansel it don't show so blatantly at lower resolutions. When checking the negative, there's nothing on the surface, it's just in the image. What the!?



• Despite the individual plastic sleeves, the tree-against-sky picture had a long vertical scratch over the central tree, shooting up into the sky. Using Photoshop's "stamp" feature took care of most of it, but you can still see vestiges.

Other issues may be traced to the scanner (2720 pixels per inch vs. 4000 on the Nikon Coolscan 4000 ED which is about three times as expensive) or the choice of film/camera. The pictures when scanned are somewhat muddy and washed out. Doing an auto-level in Photoshop seems to help with this. I'm developing a second roll at the same lab using Kodak Royal Gold 400 (as mentioned in the link to Kodak Max 400 above) to determine if that makes any difference in a P&S camera. I'll use the same lab for consistency.

My third experiment hasn't even begun. I bought another roll of Max, and I'm gonna have it developed (when finished) at another lab in Tualatin, in a strip mall by Donut King. Sometimes the drab hovel has the better processing, at least if you believe Philip .