Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 1996/06/02
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]Bill, Thanks for your comments. Color negative films and 1-hour processing have done more to degrade photographhy than any single combination. People expect nothing today, and usually get it. The convenience is grand; the results are nothing short of awful, usually, but do fill a need and do provide people with fast, cheap prints. The negative films are probably about the same, but Kodak, for one, does still have a broad line of color negative choices for a reason. The unknown and uncontrolled variable is the local 1-hour mall shop or drug store run by high school dropouts who scratch negatives, operate dirty machines, and couldn't care less about anything. We have two such operations in our village and I use both. In my gem books I usually have 4-10 pictures (of about 100-120 total) that I scan from the negatives I shoot. I take the film up, have a cup of coffee, wait, and just use the terrible prints as a proof sheet because their colors bear no relationship to what I shot or what is in the neg. So, I suspect that your Florida experience was processor differences. All 1-hour machines are auto-everything. They cannot handle any of the usual exposure-reading problems everyone faces.... light backgrounds, dark backgrounds, etc. I photography jewelry and gems for my books on either black or white backgrounds, since I drop them out in PHotoshop anyway. You should see the mess I get back in the 4x6 prints. Awful. I shoot these with studio strobes and meter them with a Minolta III flash meter, so I know the exposures are right on.... and the negs prove that. But the prints are awful because the auto-exposure machines (unless manually overridden) average the exposure and ruin the prints. Pointing out this detail to the operators is hopeless.... so I no longer try. Just give me the negs and let me scan them in and use them. The only way to get anything like a side-by-side test would be to shoot the same film as your Canon user and have them run through the same machine at the same time using the same chemicals and paper. Fred Ward