Curses and Joys

I've not seen too much daylight this week because of the extensive quantity of scanning I've been doing.  17 rolls of film?  What was I thinking?  I keep forgetting that "time is money" and spending the money for a photo-CD at time of development is actually a good thing.  I can whip through an entire roll in a minute or two figuring out my keepers and then scanning at 4000dpi only the ones I want to mess with--otherwise, even the trashy automated scans aren't horrid for most uses. 14 of those rolls are specific to the event shoot from Friday night and Saturday.

This next week, (Monday-Wednesday) I have a major event shoot, followed by another event on Thursday. I bought 19 rolls of film today to handle this.  Yes, I'll stop being a dope and will pay the extra for the photo-CDs... It's worth the time savings. I didn't bother this last time, because of the low keeper rate.

Now, that said, I've been extremely pleased with the quality of the images--even from ISO 400 and 800 consumer films. There is a depth to the images which the digital images just can't match. I'd show you pictures, but don't have general release from the primary client yet.  I do know that next week, about a hundred pictures will be used in a large-scale presentation being assembled right now by the client.

I know that if it wasn't for the killer OM kit, I'd have gone out and bought a new digital camera last year, but the reality is, I can buy a ton of film (and in this case, the clients paid extra to cover the expense) and still come out ahead financially. And besides, shooting with the OM kit is actually enjoyable and relaxing.

Relaxing?  Enjoyable?

Yes, for me it is.  Event coverage with a digital camera means a lot of "overshoot". I don't have time to chimp other than to make gross adjustments, so knowing that I'm handicapped by the dynamic range, noise-floor, autofocus speed/accuracy, and the lack of OTF flash control, I'm shooting several times more images than I ever did with film. Unfortunately, this past weekend, I was shooting film like it was digital...  That's Old/New habits for you.

So, going into next week's events, even though I have as much film as I did the previous event, I'm going to slow down on my shooting rate and really make sure that I'm getting the shot correctly up front--ie., pre-editing. I had hoped to shoot, maybe 1000-1200 pictures last weekend, but ended up just short of 3000. Granted, much of that was due to the extremely difficult lighting conditions (inotherwords, it was way too dark), but much of it was also due to my own sloppiness just because I could.