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Re: Photography



On Sun, 2 Jan 2000, Richard J. Sexton wrote:

> If I had to sue film I'd use 50 ASA Ektachrome and have them make
> me a disc, not the slides it was intended for, or get the slides
> and use a slide scanner to make imaegs for printing, displaying
> etc. The new photo printers really do make pictures *as good as*
> photographs, at least from 6" away; that it you can see dots
> but you have to look VERY closely.

If you scan straight to digital, I wouldn't even bother with slide film.
The main advantage of slide film is the ability to see what the picture
"really" was without any color balance tweaking typically done at the
printing stage, or if you want to send it to a magazine, or if you ever
want to use it in a presentation (even this, though, is changing as people
use laptops and video projectors to give their talks).  Print film is in
general much less grainy than its same ASA slide brethren.

One alternative I've used a few times in the last year is buying very
cheap print film such as Kodak Gold or Royal Gold or whatever they've got
at Costco on rebate.  Then I shoot LOTS of pictures & take them to the
costco 1-hour photo, but only get them to develop the negatives (i.e. NO
PRINTS).  Total cost is maybe $3 a roll for film and processing.  From
there I scan in the negs that "came out" (this step requires a computer
and slide/neg scanner); as Richard said, this yeild is typically very low
for fish pictures anyway.  I'm very pleased with the results. I shoot 800
speed print film and it looks as good as 200 speed slide film.  And it's
very cheap (for 35mm, that is.  I agree with Richard that a digital camera
is an easy way to play these days).

I don't have any good examples on The Krib proper, but on its sometimes-up
sister site site http://mystery.thekrib.com, all the pictures shown are
taken with 800 ASA print film and scanned directly from the negs.  The
optical distortion of the macro lens and water is more visible than the
grain in many cases.

   - Erik

-- 
Erik Olson
erik at thekrib dot com