the joys of film photography

David stops babbling incoherently long enough to write down semi-coherent waffle


The scanner arrived the other day. Great, I thought, get to scan all my long awaiting films of Mali and France. Should’ve been a time for celebration.

Turned quickly into rants and whining as I realised all my films were scratched beyond belief.

At first I thought it was a shitty scanner. Then I realised it was shitty film. Not the film itself per say, but the way the film was manhandled by whatever moron of a processing monkey manhandled it in Mali.

I went to this processing lab in Bamako two days before our departure. Thought it would be ok because I’d asked around and found out the best place in town. Even got one film processed the day before, just to make sure they weren’t complete assholes. Everything seemed good.

So I went there with 40 rolls, said “process away my good man” and wandered off for an hour or so. Came back and still everything seemed fine... until I started scanning this week. That’s when I noticed something was very wrong.

Those idiots in Bamako never clean their equipment. I know this because every single shot I scan in is utterly scratched to oblivion. The scratched are so small you can barely see them, so I didn’t pick it up on the trial roll I had processed. Mali is so goddamned dusty you have to clean everything obsessively. Unfortunately Malians don’t do obsessive.

So the dust removal function on the new scanner is working overtime trying to repair the mess, and whatever’s missed - which is alot - I’m going through and manually retouching; it’s a laborious job rife with tedium.

But I’m remaining positive. I now see the scratches as containing a certain je ne sais quoi that could be aesthetically pleasing. And it’s good to finally be scanning my stuff, no matter how screwed up it is.

That’ll teach me for being a cheapskate and trying to save a buck or two.

Finally a quick recap: in an earlier blog I was whinging about digital, now I’m whinging about film.

djb.