Trust is the issue.

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I mentioned that after the debacle with the first processing lab I tried that I had sought out two more which offered processing, high quality scanning and online download of the scanned images.

The first I tried was Sharprints.com in Wisconsin, and it proved to be excellent. Fast, meaning 3.5 business days from mailing to download, quality work and all promises met. Bare bones, maybe, but that’s all I need. That and promises made being kept. Click the link for more details.

The other lab I tried, ProPhoto.com in Irvine, CA came with the usual flakiness associated with large coastal city operations, just like the execrable TheDarkroom.com, also in the Golden State. Emails were not replied to, statements that the download was ready were false, calls resulted in infinite hold times and the process took 4.5 business days, which is mystifying given that Irvine, CA is but 384 miles from my home whereas Eau Claire, WI is 1,712 miles distant. Based on comparative performance and honesty and clarity of communications, I recommend Sharpprints.com in WI for film processing, scanning and download. Price is also a factor – $14 for the WI lab, $22.50 for the one in CA. One roll of Kodak Ektar 100 was the test in each case.

Here are some snaps from the latest film foray, in downtown Phoenix. Hardware was again the Nikon FE with the 43-86mm f/3.5 Zoom Nikkor:

Just the ticket.

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A friend had passed his last remaining roll of Kodak Ektar 100 to be for experimentation, and I am very pleased with the results.

This is a slow – 100 ASA – emulsion with a reputation for fine grain and punchy, contrasty colors, one it lived up to in spades.

This was also an opportunity to try another processing and scanning service after the disaster that was TheDarkroom.com which I concluded was an “offensively bad business”. I wasn’t about to give them another chance.

After some Googling I came up with a couple of services which offer high resolution scans along with online downloads of scanned images. Neither returns the original film unless you ask and that’s fine with me as I would only shred it. It’s extremely unlikely that high volume industrial grade scanners will be materially improved as the business opportunity is simply too small, so the state-of-the-art is either the Noritsu or the Fuji Frontier, both maxing out at around 4000 x 6000 pixels per scan. So retaining the original film strips, with all the attendant cataloging chores, in the hope of further scanning improvements down the road is a quixotic quest.

The first lab I tried is named Sharpprints and here’s the statement from their home page:

Click the image to go the the lab’s site.

Yes, their choice of camera, the Russkie POS Zenit, is execrable, as is the way the film is being held in that image with greasy, badly manicured fingers, but that’s really all the bad news there is. But rather than sit on my hands, I wrote them about that boo-boo:

I mailed my film roll of 36 exposures on a Monday morning using USPS ($3.50) and the scans were available for download the same Thursday at 2:17pm, accompanied by a terse email alerting me to the fact. This lab also uses Dropbox for online delivery but unlike TheDarkroom.com clearly knows what it is doing as the scans were immediately available and easily downloaded in a couple of minutes.

I found the results to be fine grained and much improved on Kodak Gold 200’s coarse and nasty grain. I’m thinking Gold 200 is just a poor quality product. Of the 36 scans one image had a fine piece of dirt on it – easily fixed in Photoshop – and all the others were fault free. The processing and scanning cost was just $14.

This roll of film gave me another chance to look at the abstraction of the varied architecture in downtown Phoenix and here is the ‘contact sheet’ from Lightroom after the cull:

34 keepers out of 36. All those years with film inculcated economy of effort.

The colors jump out at you and the film requires careful handling of highlights to avoid burn out. A little underexposure – say 1/2-1 stop – is a good idea in high contrast situations, what was called ‘exposing for the highlights’ in the previous century.

Noritsu scanner data.

Here are some favorites from this roll, all snapped on the Nikon FE and the experts assure us (who are these fools?) taken with the ‘worst zoom lens on the planet’, the excellent Nikon 43-86mm f/3.5 ‘walkabout wonder’:

It would be churlish to deny the influence of the great Keld Helmer-Petersen on my work, for he is one of the masters who taught me how to see all those decades ago in the era of film.

Sharpprints.com is located in Eau Claire, Wisoncsin and the results of their work testify to solid, midwestern American values. There’s no nonsense about creating an account so that they can inundate you with junk mail. Just mail in the film after printing, completing and including their online form and you are done. I recommend them.

A mixed bag.

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I sold my first – and last – Leica 35mm film camera 12 years ago after 35 years of use, and that tragic tale is related here. Maybe the lesson from that experience is that no modern camera is going to last 35 years as technology marches on, for in all key regards film camera technology did not improve after the first Leica M3 was introduced in 1954. Heck, you might argue that the outstanding Zeiss Contax II really defined the genre, and that was in 1936! The only material improvement added in the M3 was the suspended, illuminated frame lines, admittedly a stroke of design genius.

When my first serious digital camera came along, the magnificent full frame Canon 5D it was clear that film was toast. The flexibility and resolution of that 12mp Canon sensor was an order of magnitude above anything film could do, even if it was Kodachrome in a Leica with a Summicron lens fitted. And the sensor in that 5D delivered excellent colors, to boot. And booting was never necessary as this complex machine was as reliable as a hammer.

So it was with some apprehension that I awaited the processing of my first two rolls of Kodak Gold 24 by TheDarkroom.com, exposed primarily to check for any malfunctions in my newly acquired $100 Nikon FE body. I say that but a related goal was to take good photographs and hope that nothing went wrong.

I opted for the highest resolution 6774 x 4492 byte scans, which figures to a 30.4mb file though Lightroom reports less, likely due to compression of continuous tone areas:

Theoretical and actual scan sizes.

Exposures seem to be bang on using the camera’s Auto function, and no light leaks were noted. Maybe 1/4-1/2 stop over-exposed, but nothing to worry about. The scans are clean, scratches notable for their absence.

Anomalies? One frustrating finding is that the perspective correction controls in LR (Lens Correction->Basic->Level/Vertical/etc. are useless. They simply do not work with the film scans making a hash of things, so you have to round trip the image to Photoshop which works fine. Mystifying. These LR controls work perfectly with original digital images from any number of cameras and I use them often in architectural images. Frustrating and mystifying.

How is the resolution? Meh. It compares to a decades old 5mp Olympus C5050 point-and-shoot digital with a stated stated 1920 x 2560 byte sized image coming out at just 2.3mb in the file below. In the images below I have selected enlarged sections which would, as a whole deliver prints sized 60″ x 40″. In other words, very large. There is more detail in the film image but also a lot more grain.

The digital image shows pixelation, the film one coarse grain.

The film image was from the Nikon FE using a superb 135mm f/3.5 Nikkor stopped down to f/8 and correctly exposed.

Practically speaking the film image would deliver a decent 16″ x 20″ print, but forget selective enlargement or pixel peeping.

Here are some images from that first outing, all snapped in downtown Phoenix:

Adding EXIF data:

I like to have camera and lens data in the EXIF data for each image as that’s how I tend to remember images, rather than through clunky keywords.

As scanned the EXIF data shows the name and model of the Noritsu film scanner used by the lab.

To confer proper camera and lens data I purchased an app named ‘EXIF Editor’ from the OS X App Store. It’s a tad clunky but can be integrated into LR for the roundtrip in Lightroom->Preferences->External Editing:

EXIF Editor set as an external editing option.

Then, after restarting Lightroom, choose the photo or photos (this functionality permits batch processing in EXIF Editor) to be round tripped thus:

Here is an example of ‘before’ and ‘after’ EXIF data:

I generally find that you have to restart LR with each batch of images to be round tripped; while EXIF Editor is clunky, you can set up presets with favorite camera/lens combinations, electing the preset once the image batch is in EXIF Editor. Hit ‘Process’ and the images will be saved as additional photos in a stack for each image in LR. The originals in LR can then be deleted as they add no value.

Here is the LR metadata display after adding correct camera/lens data for the folder:

Once you establish a workflow it’s less effort than it seems and, after all, there are one 36 images on a roll!

TheDarkroom.com:

This film processing and scanning service is in Los Angeles and came recommended. Their 6774×4492 scans are the largest HQ ones I could find and unlike other services I looked at, TheDarkroom.com offers online image download from their servers which store your images for 60 days, unless you want to pay for extended storage. This is what you see once your scans are on their server:

Scanned images ready for download.

There were two snags. First this, which is simply inexcusable:

I selected just two images and got this idiotic message:

That means you have to download one image at a time.

Second, the selection box for checking images to download returns a green check mark when clicked but then clicking ‘Download’ does nothing. I managed to beat direct download links out of them – after two tries for they sent me the wrong ones. Next time I’ll take my business elsewhere. Meanwhile, they got what they deserved in my Yelp review: