John Coyle wrote: > Both Shel and Malcolm have not mentioned the combination of > film and digital which I find most convenient - shoot on film > and have it scanned at the time of development. I may be > lucky in having a very high-quality one-hour lab within two > minutes drive (or ten-minutes walking!) of where I both live > and work, but I would urge those who want the best of both to > seek out such a lab. I will probably get the *ist D (or it's > successor) within the next twelve months, but at the moment I > don't need to have a digital camera in order to have good > quality scans available of every frame I shoot (in colour > negative, anyway) very quickly. If I need higher resolution > scans than those provided by the lab, then I can make them > myself from the negatives in a reasonable amount of time, and > I do have the assurance that I have all the information in > the scene captured by the camera, without having to worry > about jpg-resolution or compression ratios at the time I take > the shot. I have Photoshop 5LE, Irfanview, VueproPrint and > VueScan for image manipulation, and a couple of built-in XP > tools as well. For cataloguing, I have my self-written > database which allows me immediate access to the scans, > whether on the hard drive or a CD, and simple, but powerful > and rapid, search facilities if I need to find a particular > shot or group of shots.
I should have mentioned this so: when I have my slide film developed, I opt for mounting and a CD. This quite obviously doesn't make me the first in a group of friends to exchange pictures, but you know why! B&W I have developed and later select any I want prints from, usually ones I feel will enlarge very well. It's taken me the better part of 5 years to find developers who I can trust. I use TranspaColor in Leicester for B&W and dLab7 in Guernsey for slides. Putting the www and com after their names give you their websites! I can already see the necessity to write a database for pictures taken with the *ist D. Malcolm
