Saturday, May 10, 2008

facebook and photography

I take back what I said about Facebook. Scrabulous isn't the best reason for joining. It's fun and all, but, wow, Facebook has so much more point than any of its predecessors. I've had lunch with people I hadn't seen for five or 10 years. (Nice people who I was sorry I'd lost track of, not boring people.) And the christmas show community is all over there - in the last week, half a dozen or so people put up their pictures of May and tagged everybody else and there's comments all over. Lots of fun. Made me feel ok about not carrying my digital camera around.

There haven't been any pictures up here lately because I've been in kind of in a non-digital mood lately. This is partly because my not-so-new employer has a way of making me feel like my pictures, and my visual sense in general, are not only inadequate but also pointless, and partly because I have no backups of the 50 bazillion pictures on my computer and kind of want to back them up before I add more. Also, my hard drive is almost full. Yikes.

I've even dragged out my film camera...so now I have a completed roll of film and have to figure out where to get it developed. Does anyone have experience with snapfish or shutterfly or whatever the heck other services there are to get prints made? Is one better than others? J.Bro, is this the kind of scrapbook-related knowledge M.Bro carries in her head? Or should I just take the film to a store? Will they even know what to do with it?

6 comments:

Unknown said...

I've been called out! Back when we used a film camera much more often, Missy always took our film to the small, independent camera shop by her store. It was about 1/3 because she wanted to support a locally-owned store and 2/3 because the pictures turned out better. She used to develop film (at Wal-mart during college, so she's clearly a pro) and says there's a lot of room for human error, but also for human improvement. A good developer can't make bad pictures good, but can fix some small problems with lighting and focus by looking closely at each negative instead of just running off the entire canister.

towwas said...

Oh, that's true. Ok, I'll take it to Penn Camera. I wonder if they can give me an electronic version, too? 'Cause I'd still like to be able to move digital versions around. If any of them are any good.

erin*carly said...

yes yes yes. go to penn camera. i've heard bad things about shutterfly and snapfish for their print quality and film processing. as a former photo store employee, i say always go to a real photo store. they know what they're doing there. (even ritz camera isn't so bad.)

erin*carly said...

ps, you can get a low-resolution CD
(scanned so you can make 4x6 prints still) for a reasonable cost. (maybe $5?) always have a CD done at time of processing - it'll cost less in the long run. they scan the entire length of film in one sitting instead of scanning each strip and frame. (it's a tedious process, let me tell you.)

Annie said...

oooh, that's great that you've used facebook to actually meet up with old friends! One or two of my Facebook "friends" are people that I barely ever knew, and will probably never know...

Cheryl said...

Having experience with Snapfish and some of those upload digital photos and we print and send them I say...go to Penn Camera. :) I have missed your photos lately. If it is any consolation I love your pictures and I am totally impressed of your use of the rule of thirds.