Musings

Returned to Dalian last night but was way too delayed at Shanghai airport to drop the first load of film off at the lab so Saturday morning, after splitting my film into 2 batches, the first batch went in and the second batch went in on Sunday when I collected the initial rolls.
I officially hate the labs in Dalian.  The other one managed to fold one of my films in half last time straight through the middle of one of the images (luckily not one from the edit).  This lab, although I have spent the past 3 months making sure any problems stopped happening (wrong size scans, cutting films in a pain in the arse way, scratching the shit out of the film etc), decided to introduce a new and unrecoverable problem.  7 of the 16 rolls they had they must have opened the cover of the developing machine too early cos they fogged the edges and in one case half the image of the last frames.  I mean, this shit is hardly rocket science so what the hell are they doing?  The biggest shit was the one and only portrait from Thames Town is fogged down the side.  I can crop and recover it but that is not the point, the image had a lot of copy space for a reason and now it does not.  I should have had the film developed in Shanghai but the extra cost was the same as my flight back.  In future, I am going to have to ensure that no critical image is at the end of a roll.  Film is cheap compared to the possibility of losing an important image.   Anyway, nothing I can do about it except learn for the future.  I showed them the problem and they said it wouldn’t happen again but that is bollocks…
So reviewing these first scans the project looks to be going well.  The images I thought would be strong from the very end are perfect and I have a lot of street scenes plus way more close ups than I remembered shooting.  The antenna image from the hut behind a hedge with no opening was fogged but there is only 1 frame here and I know I shot more so there should be some on another roll being developed now.
The second batch scans were delayed till Tuesday but picked up the negs on Monday.  See I have lost 1 or 2 more images to fogging but nothing critical.  Looking over the whole batch it is more successful in some ways than I had hoped –the early images with the bright sky work fine and do not look out of place alongside the more overcast days.  There is one batch where the sun was too directional and bright so the shadows across the images have made them unusable.  One of these was an image I had in mind for a cover but looking at it compositionally now it isn’t up to the job –it reflects non of the apparent visual banality I am looking for in the final set of images.
Wednesday was mostly just taken up with filing –oh that job I despise so much after a year in the Magnum offices doing just that to other people’s negs.:)  Had to do all the films I have shot on the medium format since being here so, whilst only about 60 rolls or so, took all day when you consider that having no contact sheets meant comparing every scan to the negs to number the scans all correctly.  At least that is a job I won’t have t repeat and by doing it now means I won’t have different version of the scans with different filenames all over the place.