Friday, June 12, 2009

Back to analogue photography

If you've read my blog before you'll know that I love my Lomo Cameras. The cool thing about them is that they are analogue i.e. they aren't digital cameras they use good old fashioned 35mm film. This means that I have to get them processed in the old way with chemicals and everything.

This way of processing photographs has been around for nearly 100 years. But very quickly its become a niche service. Companies who until recently only charged a few pounds for processing and capturing on CD suddenly doubled their prices.

I used to take my films to ASDA nice and cheap and decent quality processing too but then the price shot up from £2.50 per film to £4.00 shocked and skint I decided to look else where.

So I tried Max Speilman, they seemed to know what they were doing, they've been around for years. Unfortunately they don't have a clue, my film was badly processed, so much so that you can see their finger prints allover the scans. Then the prints where scanned badly so that the images ended up on the wrong prints. Never, ever using them again.

Then I tried Snappy Snaps, cool name (they even sell Lomo Cameras). The processing is great but the price is a bit steep too. £5.99 per film! When I went to collect my pictures today instead of £11.98 they tried to charge me over £17 as they said that the person who'd taken my order had forgotten to charge me for the CD's. £17 for 48 pictures is just crazy so I complained and they dropped the CD charge.

What I'm getting at is that I understand that film processing is dying out due to digital cameras but there is a massive surge towards people still wanting analogue photography. The number of people who are members of Lomography measures several million on it's own. This means that there's still a massive demand for film processing.

I just need to find somewhere that will do my processing for a decent cost at a decent standard. If you know anywhere please let me know. And if they're any good I'll tell all my friends and they use it too. This good service will make a lot of money because the niche who need it are on the look-out for it.

1 comment:

  1. Are you talking about black and white film? If you are it's very easy to develop it yourself - you don't even need a darkroom if you are not going to make traditional wet prints.

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