Re: [at-l] Film Developing Question

[Daniel Berlinger <daniel@circumtech.com>]

> 1. Mail the rolls home to be developed after the hike. Seems silly if #2 will 
> work.


Not particularly recommended. Exposed film is somewhat fragile read temperature/chemistry sensitive. Letting it sit around is not a good idea, never mind the potential temp swings in the mailing process.

> 2. Maildrop a whole bunch of mailorder film mailers from one of the mail order 
> firms such as York, Mystic, or Seattle Filmworks and send the photos off for 
> developing, having the prints sent to my permanent address. This seems like a 
> good solution; will the developers send me a whole bunch of film mailers if I 
> explain my need for them? Free postage is one of my favorite flavors.


Plenty of prepaid mailers out there. I use a variation of this as I trust my film to custom lab where I keep an account. Lots of the custom labs can deal with variations to the theme of how to go about billing you. Guess that's why they call the m custom :)

> 3. Have the photos developed on trail (one-hour), mailing the prints home. The 
> only advantage here is that I could annotate the photos on the trail;

I don't recommend this because of the varying quality of prints made at these places.

As for the annotation, well you can do the old fashioned thing I do, which is record it in a small journal with a pencil. I tend to take a lot of pictures (I find film a lot cheaper than trying to find money and time to make it back to some place) so I take a picture of the journal page at the beginning of a roll, or at the start of new section of pictures (starting at say 15 on a roll). I also try to take pictures of road signs, welcome to signs, trail signs etc to provide context.

This way when I get home I just have to match up the journal pages to the slides.

I tend to use one corner of the journal as a large page number. Sometimes when I'm not careful you can't read the writing on the journal page but the large page number is always resolved in the picture. Then I just have to match it up.

Daniel


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