Alkahest my heroes have always died at the end

July 25, 2006

Time to switch to digital?

Filed under: Photography — cec @ 10:44 pm

I like taking pictures. When it comes to outdoor/wildlife photography, I like taking lots of pictures. K and I went on vacation to Yellowstone for two weeks, getting back at the beginning of June. I wound up with 22 rolls of 36 exposure slide film. For those of you keeping score at home, that’s almost 800 slides. Considering the number of “37 exposure” rolls I took, I feel safe calling it 800.

Now, unless you want to come to my house where I can show some of the better slides, the majority of people won’t see these pictures in their current form. To make them more accessible, I needed to get the good shots scanned. So, a short check list:

  1. Get 22 rolls of slide film back from the developer [Check – received mid June]
  2. Put 800 slides into transparancy holders so they are easy to look at on the light box [Check – took two nights]
  3. Go through 800 slides to determine which are worth scanning [Check – took another two days]
  4. Scan 120 or so “good” slides [Check – finished tonight after three nights of scanning]
  5. Color correct the images in the GIMP [ ]
  6. Remove dust from scans because my slide scanner doesn’t have an infrared channel [ ]
  7. Upload the results and put ’em online [ ]

After all of that, I can’t help but wonder if it is worth the time and money to shoot slides as opposed to digital. On the other hand, everyone needs a hobby to keep them out of trouble.

3 Comments

  1. The costs to develop that much film along would pay for a big chunk of a new camera. Go digital, dude- given the quality of modern digital SLRs, if you do that volume of film, the only reason to stay with film is masochism. The quality is excellent, the cost (over time) is less, you have to carry around less crap on trips. Go for it!

    Comment by Luis — July 25, 2006 @ 11:07 pm

  2. Just make sure you have lots of backed up disk space and a way to deal with aging media.

    Comment by bc — July 26, 2006 @ 9:49 am

  3. […] years ago, I made the switch to digital SLR photography.  The primary reason was the workflow.  When I shot slide film, I would have to get the film developed, look at each image, scan the […]

    Pingback by Alkahest » Blog Archive » Photography workflow — June 3, 2010 @ 4:48 pm

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