I’ve been asking every once in a while at Hollywood Express when Rivers and Tides would come out on DVD. Now I know the answer. Late September? Too long to wait…
What's been on my mind lately? Read on...
I got the photos back from our outing on Saturday. They didn’t come out quite as well as I’d hoped, but there were a few salvagable ones… check ’em out here.
Since I got the replacement scanner on Friday, I’ve been scanning a few frames a day. For kicks, here’s an example of what the Minolta DiMAGE Scan Dual IV can do:
This is a 100% crop from the above image (the red highlighted portion viewed at full resolution):
Not bad! This negative was a pretty good one – scratched or really dirty negatives yield pretty spotty images that take a bunch of time to remove (in Photoshop or the GIMP).
The big feature you get if you spend about twice as much money on a scanner is Digital ICE, and it eliminates the need to remove dust and scratches in Photoshop. In addition to scanning the red, green, and blue channels of an image, it uses infrared light to detect defects on the film (like dust or scratches). It’s my understanding that the scanner shines this beam through the film at different angles and determines which features are part of the photo and which are really defects. Very cool, but a bit too expensive for me.
In other photography-related news, Dan and I went out yesterday morning to the Ipswich River Wildlife Sanctuary to take some pictures. We saw lots of birds & critters, and had a good time. My photos are due back from the camera store Monday (Dan’s got a nice digital SLR, so he gets more or less instant gratification) – I’ll let you know how they come out.
I spent a couple hours last night organizing my photo negatives. I managed to get them all in to sheets and each sheet labelled, though I had to do some sleuthing to find out when I had taken a particular roll of film. I seem to be missing exactly one strip of four frames out of the whole lot, and it doesn’t even have pictures that I like on it. Not bad!
I didn’t do anything with the 10 or so rolls of APS film I’d taken (the negatives are stored in a film canister instead of flat), but even counting those, I thought I had more pictures than I really do. There might be 25 sheets of about 20 frames apiece, plus the APS canisters, totalling a modest 800 photos or so, spanning 6 years.
Wanna see some absolutely gorgeous pictures from National Parks in the US? Check out Quang-Tuan Luong’s site.
I’m planning a visit to San Francisco in the fall, and thinking about taking a two or three day camping trip to a park not too far away. Any suggestions?