Two rolls Kodak 100 dropped at the lab. Start to cut one up for scanning when I realize that I’m in the shot… hey, this is Kodak 200! Courtney….! Ah, she’s got the right one.

I’ve had no luck finding good C-41 lab services here in the Santa Clara area. In Hawaii, the Kailua Long’s Drugs would run C-41 process-only for 99 cents. I knew the lady at the counter and talked to her a bit about her beloved shiny new Noritsu print machine. The negs I got from Long’s were as good as the ones I could get from the $7 pro lab downtown in Honolulu. I could even leave her my 6x7 negative-sleeve pages and she’d use them in place of the drugstore 4x sleeves they normally used.

Here in the glamorous South Bay, no one I’ve found will do a process-only for less than $2.99 and they all seem to be equally miserable, even the local pro labs. Whose idea was it to roll-up the negs and shove them back into a plastic 35mm can after processing, ensuring that there are cinch-mark scratches on every negative? It’s always that or cut into odd shapes with scratches and (worse yet) little plastic tabs taped-onto the strips. This practice seems nearly universal, and no local lab seems gracious as my Long’s Drug lady, who would cut negs to my specification for free.

The first roll today is socked-in with dust — not the casual sort of dust you get while handling or sleeving or scanning, but dust that’s glued-onto the neg, big clumps that adhered when the negs were drying. Pec-12 and air blasts are helpless against this sort of thing. sigh No wonder I still like doing B&W myself. It’s just too hard to get C-41 films like XP-2 processed in a way that’s as clean as my kitchen or bathroom.