Milsurp After Hours

Kodachrome has gone away. The potential for the "nice bright colors" has slipped into the now dead past. The last lab to process the technically difficult wonder transparency has called it a day on doing the magic for whoever has horded any. Too bad in a lot of ways. Besides they don't make slide projectors any longer either....at least Kodak doesn't. And for Kodachrome it's a shame. Those transparencys had a shelf life....after developement of 100 years without losing anything. The photos you took on the digital last year are more or less lost on disks you probably misplaced or mislabeled or scratched already, if you remembered to save any of them at all, and even with your best "enhancement" , whatever you saved, will always seem a bit flat and never really jump when you view them. Where do you think your digital photos will be in 100 years? Fat chance of them existing or anybody looking at them if they do.

I dug out one of my old fashion cameras day before yesterday. I picked out the waterproof Canon AS-6 on purpose. I knew I was going fishing yesterday and wanted to see if it would still work. I replaced the batteries and loaded the cheap film I picked up from Walgreens....but not of course as cheap as the nothing that it would cost to use a digital SanDisk...and it only would record 24 images instead of the thousands on the whizbang new modern technological science fiction come to life one.


I took the photos and sent them off to York....just like twenty years ago. They and Clark are still in business, although I'd imagine they do most of their prints from digital images. Cost......$4.80 total to develope and print, with the extra charge of 35 cents included to expedite the whole process......and I get to wait a week or so to see the images. No instant gradification. I'll just have to wait and see how it all comes out.

Results are in on experiment on cheap prints. And...the winner is use a good digital camera and upload online and get the prints in a week that look actually a little better than the original digital image because the company has a good color correction.

The print film took from July 29 to today for the turn around. The camera might have been somewhat at fault on the image quality. But the images from negative prints...same company...were not even close to as good.

I scanned the negative printed images and hit "sharpen" once. I used the digital images from my computer file and hit sharpen once.

The top two pictures are scans of prints made from film.

The bottom two show top the digital image and under it the print made from the digital image.

What you have to remember about print film processing is that it is done automatically.

The film is fed through a machine that devolves & dries the film then prints an image from the negative, collects the images and the film on separate rolls. These rolls may contain 20 different films.

Next the film and prints need to be matched up, the prints cut into singles and the whole lot sent back to the photographer.
remember I said 'automatically' What this means is that the machine processes all the different films as an average and because each camera is slightly different it doesn't print the whole image, it misses a border of about 2mm ( if I remember correctly ) so if you have something near the edge of the negative it will chop it off - painful

If you look at most prints that have sky it is normally lacking in detail. If you check the negative you will probably see more detail. This will confirm that the washed out look is not bad photography on your part but averaged printing on the part of the lab.

That is why digital imaging and printing your own has killed film off as well as being much more cost effective.