Beneduce VineyardsWhile I have a few camera shops nearby where I can drop off a roll of 35mm film. Most don't develop the film themselves but outsource the process to New York City or Philadelphia labs. I have been mailing my undeveloped 35mm film to California and New Hampshire labs and paying for developed negatives and scanned images. Developing and scanning costs about $25-$30 per roll. Shooting film is an expensive hobby.
I bought an Epson V600 Perfection Photo scanner to scan some old family portraits earlier this year. It was a fun but tiring exercise, but I was happy to preserve some family photographic history. I wanted to develop my photo-scanning skills to eliminate the cost of scanning film. I also wanted to see if I could match or improve the scans from the various labs. At first, I used Silverfast 9 with the Epson V600 but needed help finding a consistent workflow. But after reading Matt Wright's article about Picking your Color Negative Film Stock, I installed Negative Lab Pro for Lightroom, followed Matt's advice, and rescanned some Kodak Pro 100 negatives. The results were so much better than what I have received that I sent out my last few rolls for development only.
Film photography can be frustrating unless you develop your film and scan at home. I may expose a roll of film over a day or a few weeks. You mail or drop the film off at a lab for developing and scanning. You wait. A few weeks later, you get your negatives or scans back. Unless you shoot polaroids, there is no instant in film photography. The scans below are my own from a set of negatives from a roll of Kodak Vision3 250D that I exposed in August. The film roll was developed by Boutique Film Labs in Juliet, Tennessee.
It was the weekend after I broke my Fuji X-T2. I want to achieve another success with the Minolta XD-11 and Kodak Vision3 250D.
We were at Beneduce Vineyards to hear "Fitz" perform in the band "Winery Katz". Fitz and his wife Monica are friends with our other friends, Matt and Jean. Matt is a guitar instructor who performs as one-half of the Acoustic Road duo. A month earlier, during our visit to Unionville Vineyard to hear Acoustic Road, I had asked Fitz when he would be perfuming. He replied that he was performing with musicians on August 14, and we immediately reserved a table. He cheekily named the band "The Winery Katz". Bhavna told her family, and before we knew it, we had three more couples with us - Bhavna's older sister, Nilima and her husband Mukesh; her younger brother Uday and his wife Bhairavi, and Uday's work-mate Oleg and Monica. The more, the merrier. It was a fun evening.
The sky indicated we might get wet, but it lasted only a few minutes. We had a fabulous time dining on wine and charcuterie.
