Re: Photographing irises

From: Scott Aitken  <zebra@chcs.com>

>Date: Sun, 29 Sep 1996 13:48:31 -0700
>From: "Edmund L. Castillo" <castillo@pipeline.com>
>
>I recently received an advertisement with two rolls of film, one each ASA
>200 and 400, from the Seattle Film Works, P.O. Box 34056, Seattle
>98124-1056.  This is one of those mail order photo services which charges
>about the same as the corner drug store for processing but gives you a new
>roll of film free.  What interested me about their service was that for
>something like $3.95 a roll they will put your photos on a compact disk so
>that you can view them on your computer.

For casual photography, Seattle Film Works is a terrific deal. Probably the
same for the CDs.

A few big caveats though!!

There are a lot of photo developers who can't or won't develop film
manufactured by Seattle Film Works, nor will they make reprints from the
negatives. It is excellent quality film, but it can damage the equipment of
many cheepo 1-hour photo places. I don't understand why they can't make
reprints, but when I wanted to blow up a couple of special photos from a
Thailand vacation a couple years ago, I ended up having to send it back to
Seattle Film Works, because none of the local shops would do reprints.
While the basic prints were a good deal at Seattle Film Works, the
enlargements were costly and time consuming. I have stopped using their
film.

200 - 400 ASA film is probably fine for casual photography too, but you
will find that most professional photographers would cringe at the thought.
Most would recommend 100 ASA or less. This is why: the higher the ASA, the
more grainy the pictures will be. Usually, you won't notice this much on
small prints, but if you ever blow one up to an 8x10 or something, it
becomes very obvious. Forget anything larger. Unfortunately, lower ASA film
requires more light. This should not be a problem for most outdoor iris
pictures. It can become a factor if you are taking pictures inside or on a
heavily overcast day.

In working on the AIS Bulletin, my father and I did a little experimenting
with photo CDs. The color photos in the July Bulletin were all digitally
rendered. There are a number of places to get them made. I found that the
inexpensive ones ($40 or less for a CD) were not of good enough quality for
magazine publication. Usually the color seemed OK, but not quite accurate
if you compared closely to the slide (we were using slides, not prints).
For the Bulletin, we ending up taking the slides to a professional prepress
company. The slides are scanned at 300dpi or better, and stored on a zip
disc which I supply them. They cost about $40 - $100 per scan, depending on
the size we require. This is not much savings from just having them do 4
color separations, but the color is very accurate, and it does allow me to
crop, shadow, and otherwise digitally manipulate the photo before having
the color separations done. These scans take up a lot of space. A full page
scan at 300 dpi takes up about 25-30 megs of space on your drive. If you
just want a photo CD for fun, for displaying on your computer monitor
(which displays at only 72dpi) or TV, or making simple color ink jet copies
for an iris sale, the inexpensive CDs are probably fine.

You don't have to spend tons of money for decent photos. The JPEG of BEFORE
THE STORM on the AIS web page was taken with cheep 200 ASA print film with
an inexpensive compact camera. It was developed at a local 1-hour photo
shop. I scanned it with a cheep Microtec scanner at 72dpi. I would never do
this for a professional magazine or book, but it ain't half bad for a web
page.  :)

Scott Aitken
<zebra@chcs.com>
http://www.isomedia.com/homes/AIS  (AIS web page)
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