Wednesday, January 15, 2014

Local Color

The only place I know in Albuquerque that will still locally process film is Picture Perfect at the corner of Menaul and Juan Tabó.


Picture Perfect will process any kind of film.  If you get it in early, you might get it back the same day.  They also do digital, and they will accept work by snail mail or email.  Film processing costs $7 per roll.

Here are some samples of their processing, shot with my Voigtlander Vito II on Fuji 200:





I only used Picture Perfect a few times in the past when I could still go down to my corner Walgreen's and get my color negs back in as little as twenty minutes.  Of course, that was only good for 35mm, and Picture Perfect could dunk my medium format color and get it back within a day.  I would have been happy to use them for all my color work, but they are located clear across town and there was considerable added time and expense as a result.  Now, I'm having to rethink the process since Walgreens, Walmart, Target, CVS and Costco have all gotten out of the 1-hour film business.

3 comments:

Jim said...

$7 a roll? That's pretty good. But I do understand about the across-town drive.

As far as I can figure out, the only place here in Indianapolis that still processes film is a camera store on the south side of downtown. I have no other reason to go to that part of town, which is probably 20-25 minutes away by car. So I've never tried them.

Julio F said...

Those are pretty good - the Vito lens has a very nice color rendition.

In my town, there are still two 1-hr labs for C-41, but quality is very poor. I have switched to B&W and scan myself.

Mike said...

I'm happy shooting b&w most of the time; I like having control over the whole process. In fact, today I want to Camera and Darkroom to pick up some developer as my Ilfosol 3 is about gone. I was happily surprised to find they had a half dozen bottles of TMAX developer. The bottle shows an expiration date of 2/14, so they are likely selling off the last of the supply.

I'm not real concerned with specifics of film and chemical supplies. I'm pretty sure there will be options available as long as I am able to need them. If the Fuji machine at Picture Perfect gives out, I still have the option of processing my own color. For b&w, I'm encouraged to have found some examples of very nice results from caffenol.