My first film post in a couple of months. (It’s hard to develop and scan B&W at home with a nine-week-old in the house!)

I got these rolls developed at Dwayne’s, a large lab in Kansas that is famous as the last Kodachrome shop standing. They did a decent job and the price is right (I would have preferred if they had sleeved my negs instead of just sliding them into a paper envelope, but for $3 I can’t complain too much). In the end, though, shipping really added to the cost and the turnaround time was close to a month — mostly the fault of the postal service.

One thing these rolls made abundantly clear was that the taking and viewing lenses on my Rolleiflex are not focussing to the same plane, leading to lots of out-of-focus images (unless D.O.F. is on my side). That problem is in the midst of being fixed and I’m looking forward to lots of crisp, clear, shallow-D.O.F. images later this summer.

This started out as a colour, 16:9 image from my Panasonic LX2 point-and-shoot camera. Then I cropped it, converted it to B&W, tinted it, and sharpened it — in Picasa (Google’s free image-manipulation program).

Picasa is actually more powerful than people give credit for.