The Plastic Lens ~ Words

On visiting Ralph’s site after he left a comment on my little pod-cast thingy, I found myself nodding my head in understanding through much of his most recent post where he talks about (among other topics) the way labs deal with medium format film, specifically medium format film from toy cameras. The lab I use for my 120 used to do weird stuff with my shots when it came to printing them, I think it might be part of the automated development process to adjust for colour and exposure anomalies. Worse, however was that they would crop my square format images to a rectangular format (ala 35mm) or they would decide that certain images were too blurry to print! (Lucky I got any of my toy camera images printed at all really!)
I only picked up on this unwanted editorialising when I examined my negs. I finally educated them that I composed my shots with the square format in mind and that yes, some of these images may be blurry or even have the occassional light leak or two! So eventually they got to print every exposure and in square format too!
It all depended on who was working at the lab on the day though (despite specific instructions each time) and I got sick of the arbitary cropping and exposure/colour/everything adjustments done by their equipment. I purchased a scanner capable of scanning 120 format and now I just get the negs developed and scan them myself. Even though it takes a bit more effort and a lot of vigilance re: dust etc. (please – don’t talk to me about dust!!) & patience re: positioning the negs in their holder etc. (don’t talk to me about newtonian rings either!) I am much happier with the final results.