Waiting

Hey, guess where I am again. If you said the photolab, you’d be right. I’m waiting up in the digital lab for a scanner. Not you’re everyday run of the mill scanner of course, no… these are massive 24,000dpi “drum scanners.” Basically, it sucks the negatives up into the machine itself and then makes a very very slow scan at insain resolutions. Shit, a preview takes about a minute and a half. But that’s ok. The main reason I’m up here is to save some money. You see, all of my work this quarter has been on slide film. Slide film is a bitch to print, it just never looks good. The costly solution to this would be to scan my negatives, invert them, have them digitally burned onto new negative film and then hand print them like they were the originals. Fuck that. I’m taking the easy way out. I’m scanning them and having them digitally printed at the only photolab in town that does a good job, and we’re not talking Kinkos here. Taking the long way would cost… well, lets see… $8 to get the possitives developed, $15 to have them reburnt as negatives, another $8 to get the nagatives developed and then I’d still have to print them myself. Instead, I paid $8 to have the developed, I’m scanning them for free in the schools lab and then having them printed for $2.50 each at the photolab. Aren’t I thrifty. The downside to this is that they don’t look as nice as real hand-done prints but you know what… unless you really really look, it’s hard to tell and I just don’t care anymore.

Hmm… both scanners are taking a shit load of time. I hate stupid people. You’d be surprised by how stupid some people can be when it comes down to something as simple as scanning a negative. Honestly, I don’t see why the entire process shouldn’t take more than an hour a piece. And that’s assuming you’re scanning a shit load of negatives. I scanned 10 in an hour, had them burnt to a cd (man I love TOAST for Macs) and was done. These people are lucky to get 1 done in the same time frame. They take their sweet ass time aligning the negative ever so perfectly in the slide tray, spraying canned air at it to get rid of dust, color correcting it in the preview window before finally scanning. Then it’s a brain-fart when they get to Photoshop, since that’s what the scanner dumps things into. They think they need recolor-correct, recalibrate, etc. Some little ass-hats actually have the nerve to sit there and spot tone or heal-brush AT THE SCANNING STATION! The point of having a scanning station is that you scan, move it across the network to a work station AND FIX IT THERE! Man I hate stupid people.

Well, someone’s almost done with one of them which means I move up in the line a little. I think I’m still 2 people away from it though. I realize that these things are $15,000 each, but you’d think they’d have more than 2. Anyway, after all this I get to have a wonderful dinner out with my Lauren. I can’t wait. I think we’re getting Italian which makes my stomach dance with delite. We haven’t been “out” in a while because we’ve been busy with classes and homework but tonight we’re going to relax a little. I can’t wait. Later.