Sheppards Dell Falls 3D (First of Three)

I should know better by now that trying to get a service that deviates significantly from the norm is going to be expensive, a disappointment, or in this case, both. For most people what cannot be done by rote cannot be done. If somebody else hasn't already established the procedure the creative leap required to go from concept to execution is too much to ask.

The first few rolls I shot with the stereoscopic camera I took to the machine-lab at the London Drugs on the corner. Someone there was able to deal with the unusual format well enough and I was able to get prints. There were a few mistakes, but nothing terrible. Either that person is gone or the machine was "upgraded". My last couple of attempts at getting inexpensive machine processing were rejected with the claim, "Our machine can't deal with this format." So I settled for simply having the negatives developed and scanning them myself. Unfortunately my scanner doesn't do the best job in the world with scanning negatives so the process was not satisfactory. This time around I decided to try having the stereo pairs custom printed so I could make decent scans from the prints. This was not worth while. Despite stipulating that having the colour and exposure match on the pairs was important this is not what I got in the end. The individual prints are done quite nicely but the colours vary far more than the machine-prints and, while it helps the individual exposures, the manual dodging makes it a huge pain to match histograms for the two halves. I had seven pairs developed. Only four of those will be workable as animations and since two of those four are virtually the same picture, it is only worth doing for three.

At $9.50 per custom print (and remember, seven stereoscopic pictures means fourteen prints) the three I can use work out to about $50 each. That is not worth it. Given how quickly $20/stereoscopic image adds up it seems my only viable option for getting prints and decent scans is a high quality film scanner.