Have you ever thought to yourself, "Film and photofinishing is expensive! I wonder why?" I'll tell you! In story format!

Today somebody brought in some film to be developed. He said is was a old, so I figured it'd be like most old undeveloped film. The prints would be a little red, maybe purple.

You know that brownish color negatives are? Usually if they are left to sit before being developed, they go greenish. These ones did not. They were purple. Not the dark purple of C41 black and white. Light purple, almost lavendar.

Yeah, I was shocked too. However, I'm a lab tech, this is our kind of fun. We get to try and figure out why this happened and how to fix it! What happened I know, it was old - it might also have been exposed to x-rays, heat, extreme cold, or water! I fed it into the machine. As I the prints were green. "Why Green?" you ask? That's the way negatives work! I'll show you:

Red<->Cyan
Green<->Magenta
Blue<->Yellow

So you can see, red becomes cyan on negative, green becomes magenta, and blue becomes yellow. So a negative with a strong magenta tone will be a print with a strong green tone. This was more lavendar, so it had some yellow in it as well.

This is what the first print looked like:


Greeny-yellowy. I thought to myself, "maybe it was supposed to be black and white... it's just colored for some reason."

So I made it black and white:


The prints still looked a little iffy, the colors were off. Even the black and white still seems a bit wrong.

So I did the thing they pay me money for. I tried to correct the colors. I pulled out lots of yellow, cyan, and magenta. After removing five levels of cyan and magenta, and 12 levels of yellow I got this:


Still yellowy, but I couldn't remove any more, the program was at it's limit XD. I darkened it up a little bit, but not too much. His arm is a bit washed out, but anymore and I lose the face. It's a complicated thing trying to fix film.

"So that's why photofinishing is expensive! They have to try and make it look good!" You're thinking. We'll you're wrong!

Film is mostly silver. Silver is expensive. Therefore film is expensive. Photofinishing is expensive by relation.







=D

Hysteria is hard!

*dies*

Backlighting is horrible.

Seriously. You think the way everything is silhouetted looks cool? It can! But not always! After developing 11 rolls today of backlit PEOPLE, I've come to dislike it. So, I'm hear to show you the ways in which you can properly light someone. Now remember, I am NOT a pro, I am however someone who sees over 1000 pictures a day. And I am overly critical.

Front lit:



Front lighting gives you the full face. Nothing is shaded, and you can see everything. It's a good way to show the face, but it does appear flat and 2 dimensional.

Side lit:



Side lighting will give you a more 3 dimensional person. Shadow is more prominent in side lighting, so you sacrifice some of your subject for a more real looking picture.

Those are your two options! Seriously. You can back light somethings, but not when your subject is a person. If your subject isn't a person, go crazy. But remember, when you backlight you lose all detail and dimension. Your subject is flat and without life. Backlight a tree, back light some action scene, backlight like crazy! But when you are shooting a picture of someone, in which they are all you care about, don't backlight. For the love of god! Shoot your picture with the sun or flash infront of them or to the side! Otherwise your picture will look great to modern art students, but your local lab techs will laugh at you.

brought to you by the kind people at Black's Photography. "Black's! Where we pass judgement on your skills and make fun of you." Also brought to you by learner.org! Where they post pictures I can steal.

Making my new layout is going kinda slow. I like it so far though.

If anyone can tell me what I'm referencing in the header, I won't really do anything, but I'll be shocked.

I have my car. I love my car. My car > all else. I believe that the 1996-1998 mustangs are the best looking mustang since the end of the great mustang era of 1964-73. It has just one issue.

This:



A while ago I saw some pretty spiffy ones, but I didn't have the money. Now I can't find them. Tis a shame, really. At least I don't have ugly 94-95 style lights.

The internets is moving so slooooooooooow. It is making my subbing of jetman really hard when I can't actually get the episodes of jetman to sub. =/

So, meh.

What's new with you?

Hello.

Got me a temporary camera:



Nikon FG SLR. It's from 1980! Woo! I'm looking for a canon, though.

Lost Galaxy Power rangers:



Charlie Brown:



Could Charlie Brown be the 7th Galaxy Ranger!?

New LJ-layout is now up. I'm not sure what I think of the background. I was looking for something that would match the header, and this was as close as I could get. Eh. It'll work