"Patrick L" wrote in message
news
I've got four dSLRs, but I miss shooting film, so come Christmas, my mom
wanted me to take pictures so I dusted off my old ElanII, 28-105 lens, and
bought a roll of Kodak Gold ( nothin' particularly fancy about this rig )
with a 580ex flash took some snaps and had the pictures developed at a
local drugstore. The shots were beautiful, or at least I thought so and
so did my family. The "white balance" ( as we now call it in the digital
world ) was stunning. I couldn't get 50 bucks for that camera now ( minus
the lens and flash, of course), so no point in selling it. In fact, I
bought it at a flea market for 10 bucks.

I picked up an old Polaroid Land 250 and a bulb flash unit for a song,
and I can still get batteries and film ( fuji ) for it, so I'm looking to
have some fun with it. I found a guy that sells bulbs for it, but, I
was a little boy the last time they used them, and these bulbs have been
sitting in a warehouse for a long time. Expensive 'cuz they no longer make
them. I'm doing some math, and I think each shot, with flash, is going to
cost about 4 bucks. Sheesh -- better get it right the first time !!


Patrick



I am 100% committed to film. I buy film in 25 or 50 roll packs, and color
printing paper in rolls of (about) 200 or 600 feet, depending on the width.
I have a well-equipted color darkroom, capable of printing up to 20" wide
prints.

As for your results at the local drugstore, I think you got lucky! Many
times, the person running the machine at the one-hour photo place (whether
it's CVS, Walgreens, WalMart, etc), is a part-timer, who last week was
working the checkout register. If you find a one-hour store with very low
employee turnover, and a processing machine that gets regular factory
maintenance, stick with them!
(The automated one-hour machines want to see a certain mixture of colors and
densitites. I suspect your holiday snaps probably were within the normal
limits. If you had taken a picture of a black cat in the middle of a
snow-covered field on a sunny day, or a yellow pear in front of a red barn,
your results would probably have been less than stellar.)

I've worked with digital photographers, and at the end of the day, the
digital shooter might have shot ten times the number of frames as I did on
film, but the total number of "keepers" is nearly the same. If people 'grow
up' on film shooting, they are used to making sure the shot is going to be
good before tripping the shutter. A digital shooter can just keep firing,
hoping that one of the frames will be good.