P3D Re: Realist uncovers poor film processing!

[jacob@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Gabriel Jacob)]

As mentioned in my last post, I recently submitted stereo cards
in the fourth APEC exchange. An interesting side story to all
this is when I went to get reprints made.

Now I never made reprints of more than 1 or 2 copies at a time but
for the APEC exchange I had to make 31 copies of the left and right
image. I decided on making a total of 36 pairs (72 individual images).

When I went back the next day to pick them up, one thing I noticed
right away is that they (re-prints) didn't look as sharp as I 
remembered the "original" prints being. If I didn't remember
the first prints made being so sharp, I never would have questioned
and noticed that these reprints looked slightly out of focus. Anyways
I mentioned that to the salesperson and they mentioned it probably
isn't so. I told him maybe he is right and that I would have to
compare them with the "orignal" prints I had at home. I told him if
they weren't as good as those, if they would redo them and he yes,
but that he doubted the focusing was an issue and probably the colors
were probably slightly different. 

Anyways when I went home I looked at the first prints that were
originally made, and sure enough they were much sharper. To
verify that I wasn't imagining this I asked my wife to look at them
and she also picked out the sharper looking ones. I then mixed up
the images and I was able to pick out the fuzzier ones, since
the photographic paper was from different companies.

I went back to the store the next day and the salesperson refered
me to the manager (without looking at my images) and he agreed with
me that something was wrong. They re-did them and I got them back
nice and sharp, after one hour.

The moral of this story is that sometimes photo devlopers don't
only not adjust the densities properly, but more importantly (IMO),
the focusing of their equipement. Incidently the person who 
did the reprints has 25 years of photography experience, so it
wasn't because of lack of experience. 

Luckily for me, the original prints were done correctly the first 
time or I never would have noticed the poor processing. I would
have attributed it to the photographer (me), or to P&S cameras.
But then again I had used a Realist (should make Dr.T happy to
hear that!).  

P.S. It makes me wonder, how many images are really due to poor
focussing and not due to poor printing. Have film processors lowered
their standards (assuming they were high to begin with) with the
growing share of P&S cameras.

Gabriel


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