shorts and winter boots, originally uploaded by julesberry2001.

Having been quite upset that the scans from the first 3 films were cropped compared to the transparencies, chopping off things that I considered important details in my pictures, for the 4th film from my new PAYG camera I took the bold move of opting for the pricier scanning company: 2100¥ to develop and scan one 36 slide roll. Result: No crops! Yay! Furthermore, the scans completely trounce both our Nikon D40 and Panasonic LX3 digicams in terms of both colour depth and resolution. The exposure of the N80s is also amazing. I really didn't expect this shot to come out, with the dark shadows and James' legs being harshly lit by the sunshine.

Such things may not be so important for most photography, but it really seems to make a difference in the mountains and I now have some inkling of why people make the effort to heft those medium/large format cameras and tripods all the way up the mountains.

Of course, I am no where near skillful enough to photograph insects or birds or candid shots of people, or even close-ups of flowers with a film camera, so I still need my digi training wheels. Additionally, the 1-2 week delay of film processing doesn't exactly fit in with the daily blog concept too well! Nevertheless, even with the more expensive scan it is an awful lot cheaper and, importantly for mountains, lighter, than a D700 (221,000¥, 1kg!) which I guess may be closer to it (or better?) in terms of image quality.

[Taken on our last mountain trip to Yatsugatake with N80s]