"Sir, stop trying to give us money. You're being dumb."
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So, I had some slide film I wanted developed, but don't have the chemicals to do so. Also had some other rolls here and there, so I decided to just send them all to a lab. Set it and forget it.
But it's 2021. It's hard enough to find a good photo lab just for C41 image processing; not many out there that even touch E6. There are national labs like The Darkroom, and they're great, but it could take them an entire presidential administration just to get the scans to you. Local is better if you can find a place.
After shopping around, I decided to go with this artsy-fartsy lab in Baltimore that also does professional framing. Most of the folks who go there get negatives printed and mounted for sale. But, what the hell, they say they're open to customers and their development rates were quite good.
Along with processing, though, I paid to have printed contact sheets made of every roll, because some of these were test rolls to gauge how my light meter and Pentax are performing, and testing the range of the film. I didn't want scans because most lab scanning automatically handles exposure corrections, and if the software doesn't do that by default, the lab tech definitely would. But I wanted no fixes, to see what the exposures were out-of-camera.
I mail out the film. The very hour the lab receives it, I get a phone call.
They want to know what's up with the contact sheets. I explain.
"Well, we can just do a basic scan and not correct the exposures. It'll cost half as much, and we'll also be able to get you the results much faster."
"Really? Because some of these are really off on purpose, I was testing the film's dynamic range."
"No problem, I'll tell the tech. Other people send in similar rolls and this is what we try to recommend."
They refunded me $55. And they developed and scanned one of the rolls that same afternoon.
These people rock.
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