Beware of Ruined Negatives

Here is another great family photo taken a few weeks ago showing off my beautiful wife Mary and lovely granddaughter Rachael posing in front of the fireplace. Everyone takes these kinds of snapshots and they become the stuff that memories are made of many years later. This one was taken with the ZX-30 using Kodak Gold 200 with the on-board flash unit firing to light things up a bit.

It’s really frustrating when you send a roll of these memory makers off for processing and it comes back damaged. They above photo is one of several that came out okay on a roll sent to my local Walgreens for processing. When I got it back about half of the frames had been scratched by the machine thus showing various amounts and patters of snow & scratches.

This of course is why I generally send my film off to a professional film processing service like The Darkroom. It is nice occasionally to be able to just drop off a roll of film and get it back a couple hours later for half the price. I guess the old saying, “you get what you pay for” applies here as in so many other areas however.

Based on my recent experience I would guess taking your film to your local one-hour photo lab located in a drug or department store has about a 50/50 shot at success. The one near me seems to have frequent equipment failures and if your film happens to be the one in process when it starts happening you’re basically screwed. These guys just don’t do enough film business anymore to spend the time & money it takes to have back up equipment, keep the equipment they have properly maintained, or even hire trained and experienced personnel to operate it.  Anyway, before you decide to take the quick & cheap route to film processing just beware that you may be risking your photos in the process.