mframes

As I posted on Instagram, I’ve been really happy with my local camera shop who develop and scan my film. The Across 100 scans that I received last week did seem to be quite [too] bright though, and they also had what I’d consider to be a large amount of digital noise reduction in places. Having mentioned this to one of my photography friends, his theory was that the dust correction sw could have been turned up too high, or working too aggressively resulting in these ‘blurry’ areas. I didn’t know that traditional black and white (ie non-C41 film) film negatives can’t have dust detected by infrared light (as used by some scanners) due to the silver halide in the emulsion. I guess places that scan black and white film must have other clever devices to do the dust detection and correction. Anyway…

So I thought I’d try getting some other film labs in the UK to develop and scan my film. I’m curious to see the results from other places, but it meant packaging up my film and posting it off – eek! I really didn’t fancy this initially, but I trust Royal Mail and I decided that I was happy enough to go for it. So I sent film to two labs in the UK:

AG Photolab – 2 x rolls of Ilford HP5 – requesting medium resolution scans and tiff format.

Exposure Film Lab – 1 x roll of Ilford HP5 – requesting standard resolution scans, neutral exposure and medium contrast.

It was dead easy making the order on the websites of these guys, and sending it off was simple too, just making sure to enclose my order number in the package. AG even have a pre-paid service so you just print off a label from their website, stick it to your jiffy bag and off you go.

I feel a little guilty not giving my film to my local lab, but I feel like I owe it to myself to try other labs and I’m excited about receiving the results.