Last year I purchased a Minolta X700 SLR film camera at an antique store. I'll be the first to admit I was drawn to to the camera not out-of-an-interest in photography but more a fascination with mechanical devices and a desire to learn more about them. Here's what I learned after exposing my first roll and getting the prints back:

• The '1 Hour Photo' printed on the side of Walgreens in big fuck-off letters is a lie
• Whatever film lab Walgreens contracts with overcharges
• Two weeks later you get prints, a CD of digital scans, and no negatives

Only recently I learned that almost all film prints since the early 90s are actually just printed (like on an ink printer) scans. We could have saved all parties involved time, money, and hassle had the lab just emailed me a link to those same scans instead of snail-mailing them back to the Walgreens on physical media*.

*This is precisely how professional film labs operate. Walgreens is just weird like this

Discouraged with the drugstore experience (but still inexplicably drawn to mechanical analog devices) I made a few Facebook Marketplace purchases and took a trip to Colonial Photo & Hobby in Orlando. Gathering all of the equipment and chemistry to both develop film and make darkroom prints was surprisingly easy using only those two sources. It turns out Film is back like vinyl and I'm late to the party. Just in time to find all the equipment easily but too late to pay reasonable prices.

Below are film photos that I've taken, developed, and scanned on a Epson V600. My workflow is typically a RAW export from VueScan followed by post-processing with Darktable and final editing in GNU GIMP. Black and white shots are either stand developed in Rodinal or cooked at box speed in Ilford Ilfosol. Color is C-41

2023-08-29
Xerxes