^^^^^^^ Edit to the above: UKFL small scans are closer to AG's medium size, and a fairer price comparison. So UKFL comes out at £9 + postage + return negative cost (anyone know what they charge for this?)
UKFL send you an email with your scans, but hold on to your negatives until you've either accumulated a big enough pile (inch thick) or a year has passed. This saves you money as all of your negatives are returned in one batch and the cost of the return is spread across all of the rolls you've sent them, instead of constantly paying for return postage for each individual batch. You choose the method that they send the negatives back.
You could ask UKFL to send back the negatives earlier, but it sort of defeats the purpose of using UKFL, as they are supposed to be providing you with scans that are virtually the finished product, save for some minor tweaking, so there shouldn't be a need to have the negatives back immediately.
At any rate, these are their estimated return costs:
View attachment 21838
Even with 85 rolls and RMSD it works out to about 15p per roll, which seems pretty reasonable to me.
Thanks for the detailed advice RJ. You are certainly right about the limitations of handing over control to a shop, being used to processing every raw file, it is frustrating to get a pretty crappy JPEG back and a 5x5 print.
Any suggestions for a place I can get decent TIFF scans so I can process myself?
A lot of photographers who shoot colour negative will often just ensure that they get enough exposure for their subjects (usually by metering for the shadows) and then just let the highlights fall where they may. That will often mean that the sky is brighter in relative terms compared to the subject and some of the detail is difficult to see, but it's still there and nothing will ever actually blow out. Many medium format shooters are also often using large apertures, so detail in the skies is usually blurred and of little consideration anyway.
This approach works better when you're shooting portraits, weddings, etc., but might not be as good for landscapes, perhaps.
Many portrait-oriented films like Kodak Portra or Fuji Pro 400H aren't very saturated either, which might also make the skies seem less punchy than a similar scene on a digital camera.
I personally wouldn't have thought anything of the sky in this instance though; it looks pretty normal to me for shooting colour negative film on a grey day. What detail would you really expect to see if you're shooting on a medium format camera with very little DOF on an overcast day anyway?
If you're going to have others scanning your film and you want both detail in the skies and a foreground subject, you'd probably need to watch the subject brightness range of the scene. In all but the
most contrasty of situations, film will capture detail in both shadows and highlights, but it can be difficult to scan and display scenes with extended subject brightness ranges without using a digital ND grad tool like Lightroom offers. The other option is to do it 'in camera' as it were and use grad filters, but I would rarely use them with colour negative, because nothing actually blows out.
I haven't used Snappy Snaps for scanning in quite some time, but they did use to offer the options of TIFFs, I think. Most places supply jpegs though. I think there's a sticky thread in the main Film & Conventional forum that has information on the various labs and the scanning services they offer, so there might be info there on who supplies TIFFs. Off the top of my head, AG photo lab, Peak, and the Darkroom might offer TIFFs.
With black and white, I usually develop and scan myself and then apply an ND grad adjustment digitally later on, if necessary. With colour negative though, I just try to watch my subject brightness range and then send it to a good lab (I use UKFL) who will individually adjust each scan and effectively do the post processing for me. High street labs like Snappy Snaps will simply put the scanner in auto.
I don't think I explained myself very well re the focussing as I am not good with the film terminology. There is no split screen, just a magnifying glass that pops up and enlarges the centre of the frame. The lens is such that it magnifies The centre, but everything outside of the centre spot is a bit blurry, which makes focusing on, say the eyes, 2/3rds up then frame, tricky. I reckon 5 out the 12 shots I missed the focus, more practice needed!
Hmmm... I'm not really sure that I'm following. Is the magnifier just really small that you can't see whole focusing screen? You might need to post a photo of the waist level finder to give a better idea.
Even on my 50+ year old twin lens camera I can see the whole of the focusing screen, so I'd be surprised to hear that you couldn't do the same on the Hasselblad. I would think that the Hasselblad finder would be quite similar to my Bronica SQ-A actually.
Maybe someone with a Hasselblad WLF could chime in here?