Thursday, February 7, 2008 - 1:31PM 
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Lexington 35mm shots - first round
Since I've gone back to using print film for lightning, that means it's back to the old routine of getting things developed and scanned. The advantage to using print film is that it is much cheaper (slide film costs 4 times as much) and I can get the rolls developed quickly and cheaply at any one-hour photo lab. The drawback is that while the machines at non-pro photo labs develop the negatives just fine, they typically produce horrible-quality prints - grainy and soft with visible smearing, noise and off-balance color - particularly in lightning images that contain a lot of dark sky. As a result, I have to take the negatives to a pro lab to get satisfactory scans (and prints, if needed), a process that takes several days.
Such is the case with the roll of film from Lexington on Tuesday night. The negatives show clean, good-contrast images, but as I have always experienced, the one-hour machines just can't translate that to a good print. Below are the eight of eleven tower strikes I caught on Kodak 200 print film, scanned at home from the subpar one-hour lab prints. I have the negatives at a pro lab getting scanned, which should be complete Monday or Tuesday of next week. I'll post those when I get them so you can see the difference.
