ajft

Okay, I've collected the CD of my last two rolls of film, that's the last of my 21 rolls of APS film completed, and not before time too! QFL have excelled themselves this time. No, not by missing a frame or some other stuff up like that, this time they've sent me back the CD, two empty APS cartridges, and the exposed film rolled up, squashed and loose in the envelope! How the hell am I meant to get it back into the cartridges?

I'm glad the whole business is over because I doubt very much that I will ever have anything to do with QFL again! Appalling care and attention that the seem to have with everything they do. I rang up to ask them what on earth they were doing and was told I'd have to send the lengths of film and cartridges back so they can have a look at them! Told them no way was I sending any film to them ever again, and have been told that “a service manager will call you back.”

Providing they haven't stuffed the images up as well — I haven't checked fully — after titles and dates and resizing are completed then and #698-464 will be visible here.

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Another week and another three rolls of film completed. Even more amazingly, after two trips back to QFL, they've successfully rescanned all the photos — including the missing two — on the 379-986 roll from a fortnight ago. More date stamps, more titles, resizing and uploading and then #711-119, #855-129 and #902-122 will be here. Only two rolls left!

The end is in sight! Three rolls back on one CD, and the CD that I returned last week to be rescanned — I'll get to that one in a minute. The 2000 Bike NSW Big Ride, a few weeks in Johannesburg, and the miscellaneous cruft that fills in the spaces in between. Once again, there's date stamps and titles to be manually appeneded, then they'll be available for perusal — #647-551, #374-343 and #700-204 — and then there'll only be five rolls to go.

I would have thought that after a phone call last week explaining the problem; then returning a CD that contains 23 images together with a film that contains 25, and a note stating that 2 images were missing would be sufficient to get it rescanned. Apparently not, its been returned with a note stating: “We have checked the CD and all photos appear on this. Do you know which two were missing?” Um, 25 minus 23 is two missing, why can't they find them?

Either I'm going crazy, or the printed index sheet from five years ago shows photos 1 to 25. The CD that I've got here has 23 images, but images #23 and #24 are missing. Surely if I can spot this then so can the staff at QFL? Guess I've got to send it back to them a second time, together with the index print and a note asking them to count to twenty-five...

Over half-way complete in the APS-digitising project. Three more rolls completed, that's thirteen rolls scanned and eight remaining. Annoying though, QFL ignored the request to scan the three films onto one CD, according to the chemist it is completely arbitrary whether they read any instructions at all! The hair on the scanner that I saw a week ago is still there, now that is bugging me. Captions and dates now needed for 201-383, 379-986 and 647-548.

Damn, I'd forgotten that 17 to 44 of the first roll were all out of focus — the Elph had decided that it's auto-focus was broken and ruined all my photos of Rae and Alex's wedding, a camera fault that Canon couldn't find, but must have fixed while they were looking! Oddly too, there appear to be 44 photos on the first roll of 40, 23 images on the second roll of 25! Guess I'll have to check out the prints from back in 2000 and see what happened when they were developed.

More progress on digitising the APS films. Three more rolls of film done, ten done, eleven to go. Now for the laborious task of re-dating them, since the scanning process puts the scan date into the EXIF header, not the photo date that is present in the APS magnetic strip. Once I've added captions and the location information for the ones I'm fairly sure about, they'll appear in my albums: [1], [2] and [3]. There's a scanned hair on every image, somewhere in the lower-left corner, but its not intrusive enough for me to go through the hassles of rejecting the CD and asking them to do it again.

Not a word from Canon on the repairs to my camera! Tomorrow will be another fortnight since I called them, and a month since I dropped it in for repair....

Good news or the bad news? Good news is that I've got my photos back from Kodak, although the prints don't seem to be the same quality as I'd expect, and the CD seems to come from a third party... Are they subcontracting out their work? Is digital photography biting them that hard? Bad news seems to be that all the time and date information that the APS camera records on each frame has been omitted from the prints and the scans. I've got a helpful "24.03.2005 — 04.12.2005" printed on the index print, and that's all.

It'll be another case of a few hours of leafing through old journals and comparing notes to find when they were taken. At least most of them seem to be grouped on a few major days; Uluru, Adelaide, and the Wilson's Prom. weekend.

One other good thing may have come of it though. The CD of images seems to have been created by QFL Photos, and has their website printed on the disk. My curiosity took me there and I found that they'll scan exposed APS films to CD for around $10 a roll. Maybe I'll finally get all those old films scanned!

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Finally; the last frame has been shot on my last roll of APS film, roll #866-142. I'm still not sure whether it was a good purchase or not, the camera was pricey, the APS film and developing doubly so! Fast talking by the salesmen in the shop convinced me to go with the APS rather than an only marginaly larger 35mm camera.... Twenty-one rolls of film in seven years, and I only worked out late in the process to pay extra and get the photos on CD at development time — I still haven't got around to getting the rest of the rolls scanned from the negatives, mañana mañana....

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