There’s been a resurgence of Arty/Retro/Hipster Love of film recently. Starting I guess with the Lomo guys and I most recently found a more and more of this kind of stuff around the place. I got the tour of Sample Studios recently and they even have a dark room (remember those?).
Now, I still own far more film cameras then I’m ever likely to use and every now and then hanker to pick them up, fire the shutter and even tempted to fire off some of my few remaining film rolls.
If only I had the time.
But recently the reality of my film days was brought back to me with a bump.
I recently started leafing through my archive of neagtives looking for a nostagic picture of Mrs Lamb in order to make her Birthday card. Lots of really lovely old stuff in there and I took more time than I had available to look through those photos.
Amongst them I found a couple of images from my Student Days that I’d had half a mind to scan up so having dusted off the film scanner I ran them through.
Lovely shots (OK I might do more with the location now) but holy cow just how much crap is on that negative!!!
We’re talking, scratches, damaged emulation, dust, drying marks – plus substaintial grain issues. All that nostaglia about the details of the baths: the signage, the tiling, the scoreboards is now masked with crap. Now this was probably a home-cooked negative so much of the responsibility is mine. But I had no better luck with most labs.
Going digital was the first time I got full control over my end-to-end workflow. Aside from the ability to chimp, the flexibility and speed of digital. I finally got the quality of finish I was looking for.
Here’s the final, cleaned up image (there’s probably more that could be done with this). For anyone interested in the original scan it’s available here.
