Film First time sending film to be developed and scanned.

Some of you may have seen the snow photos I posted recently. Those photos were taken with a digital camera. That day, I also took a roll of film with my Xpan. A couple of months ago, I also took some photos with my Xpan, colour C41 roll, at a park.

I decided to send those two rolls of Xpan films (labelled one C41 colour roll and one HP5 B&W roll) to a reputable, specialist film photography lab in my city to be developed and scanned.

They sent me a bill for two B&W rolls (B&W development is apparently more expensive). I called and tried to explain that one of them is a colour roll. They said I labelled them as B&W Xpan (implying that they thought Xpan was some kind of B&W film, and implying I labelled them both as such). I said yes I did label one of the rolls as B&W Xpan. I explained that Xpan is the name of the camera, it takes panorama shots on 35mm film, and that roll was HP5 B&W. The other was also from the same Xpan camera but it was C41 colour film. That was when they realised their mistake.

A couple of weeks later, I received the film and digital scans.

I think the B&W scans looked ok. But the colour scans look over-saturated and/or overblown and/or underexposed.

Is it the Xpan overexposing the colour shots or is this part of the scanning process? I know that B&W is more forgiving but ... I'm not sure.

Here are some examples of the B&W snow shots and the colour park shots.

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The Xpan uses centre weighted metering, so the contrast between the snow a dark areas maybe a bit to much for the Xpan to handle.
Im not 100% on this as it has been ages since I used mine in snow.

The colour ones look a bit like the lab has moved the saturation slider up, seems there is a trend for images to be high saturated, mainly by those who post in Instagram.

Think a bit of tweaking in photo editing should sort it out :)

Overall I think they do look good.

Out of interest from an Xpan slide film and polariser on, home scanner:
I notice that at the bottom the EXIF data says "Nikon" :LOL: that was the scanner.


Oia Sunset.jpg
Join to see EXIF info for this image (if available)
 
The Xpan uses centre weighted metering, so the contrast between the snow a dark areas maybe a bit to much for the Xpan to handle.
Im not 100% on this as it has been ages since I used mine in snow.

The colour ones look a bit like the lab has moved the saturation slider up, seems there is a trend for images to be high saturated, mainly by those who post in Instagram.

Think a bit of tweaking in photo editing should sort it out :)

Overall I think they do look good.

Out of interest from an Xpan slide film and polariser on, home scanner:
I notice that at the bottom the EXIF data says "Nikon" :LOL: that was the scanner.


View attachment 318812

I don't mind the uneven exposure of the snow photos in B&W.

The colour ones though - it looks like the whites/light parts are over-exposed. I think the colour is ok but the exposure seems off. I don't really have a set up where I can edit photos at the moment. All my photo editing over the past 2 years have been on my mobile via LR mobile.

How did Nikon get assigned to your Xpan scans?
 
The colour ones though - it looks like the whites/light parts are over-exposed. I think the colour is ok but the exposure seems off. I don't really have a set up where I can edit photos at the moment. All my photo editing over the past 2 years have been on my mobile via LR mobile.

The only way to really know is to use a hand held meter, I believe you can get them for mobile phones but no idea what they are like.

Do an incident reading and compare to ones shot using the camera meter.

Looking again the colour ones all around look OK and yes the young lady's dress is slightly over exposed in a couple but looks fine in third image.

Could simple be that the meter, being centre weighted, is trying to get it right for the darker areas of the forest, so slightly over expose, which is just a bit too much for her dress?

Its a bit of guess to be honest.
 
The only way to really know is to use a hand held meter, I believe you can get them for mobile phones but no idea what they are like.

Do an incident reading and compare to ones shot using the camera meter.

Looking again the colour ones all around look OK and yes the young lady's dress is slightly over exposed in a couple but looks fine in third image.

Could simple be that the meter, being centre weighted, is trying to get it right for the darker areas of the forest, so slightly over expose, which is just a bit too much for her dress?

Its a bit of guess to be honest.

My digital Leicas work the same way. I took quite a few shots with them that day but they didn't exhibit the same unbalanced exposure. It can't be the film itself, film has quite a fair bit of dynamic latitude, at least far more than it looks in my photos. I don't think a light meter would solve the problem because you're right that parts of the photos look properly exposed.
 
The color scans look about as they have for me when getting them developed and scanned via cheaper development labs (Fred Meyer, a big box store like Walmart in the northwest). I doubt your camera was overexposing, but the colors do look kind of washed out and the highlights too hard. Scanning in a lab applies something like a preset that's based off the film stock, and technicians usually don't spend much time correcting individual frames.
 
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