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Old Rag



Spring!, originally uploaded by Matthew Singer.

In April, I briefly lost my camera due to a bent pin in the card slot. I sent it to Canon for repair and got the camera back in a week’s time. Unfortunately, during that time, I had scheduled a hike up Old Rag with Jon, my supervisor at the time. So, after a trip to Fed Ex, I stopped at the camera store and bought a couple rolls of film.

I’ve finally had the chance to get the old scanner out of the box and get this set of slides scanned and uploaded. While I enjoyed shooting with film again and getting some nice rich contrast and tones, I am reminded of why I decided to go digital: I hate scanning. I’ve grown tired of it. Literally. I used to fall asleep waiting for scans to finish and then slog through the process of correcting the images, slowly as my aging desktop can only handle about 4 photos open in Photoshop at a time. Color balancing is a pain because it’s not the same as a temperature white balance performed on RAW files. And then there’s the search for and fixing defects, scratches and specks on the film that the digital ICE either didn’t pick up or did a bad job of removing. It’s all time consuming, but not in the therapeutic sense that the tedious work in a darkroom is. No, sitting in front of a computer screen takes its toll.

I’m sure I’ll have some rolls of film to shoot in the future, but for now it’s primarily Digital again. So enjoy the last set of film for a while, as well as the last set from the East until I can afford to get back there.

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