Working with some older manual cameras the last week. Specifically an F3 and an FM3A. The Ektar shots here are from the FM3A, the B&W are Ilford FP4 in the F6. I think the Still I Stand shot is a winner, the rest are mostly trash. Partly because they’re just snapshots as I was excited to try out my new old camera, but also because the scans are kind of terrible.
There are horizontal stripes in the skies of many of the shots, especially the Ektar. I’ve had this issue in the past and it is not on the negatives (or the slides, I’ve had it with Provia, too, and with medium format negatives) and I’m just not sure why it’s happening. At this point I’m convinced the lab’s software is shit, and these are JPEG artifacts, as they are almost exactly what happens when I try to reduce size on a digital shot from the Z6.
The thing is, I don’t get why this happens from the originating scan. Shouldn’t it be like a full sized digital image? Are they reducing it to make it smaller for the download and just overcompressing the jpeg? Whatever it is, they claim they can’t seem to see it at the lab and, frankly, I can’t not see it. They say nobody else has the problem, but I just cannot imagine how that is true! I don’t know if I want to even bring it up again, I’m getting a reputation as the complainer, but I’m to the point where I think I’m going to have to rig a light source for my camera and a macro lens and just scan my own.
Whatever. I’m just really fucking annoyed. Here’s what I came up with. I didn’t bother to pick and choose, this is any of them that aren’t blurry because I can’t focus.
