But what's wrong with it. Well, for one thing the processing of this film was a complete disaster. There are dust and water marks all over the negatives and even after sending the film back to the lab to redo, all that changed was that there are now different dust and water marks on the negatives. (It's easier to see at full size and when there's more sky in the picture.) I'm not going to badmouth this lab, but you can be sure I'm not going back there anymore. I've been doing some reading that suggests this isn't an uncommon experience and that the problem may not be that the people working in the lab are on crack, but rather that the equipment is dusty and/or dirty. The advice is generally just to go elsewhere. (Any recommendations? I am thinking of either trying PHOTOLounge in Philadelphia or using these B&H mailers to send the film to A and I.)

Moreover, I asked for the less expensive low res scans, having no idea what that really meant. I suppose I am spoiled by the digital files of my Digital Rebel XT and my ability to manipulate resolution in Photoshop, but I assumed that low-res meant low pixel count. It turns out that, at least at this place, it means that they scan the print at the "full" pixel count (whatever that means in the world of scanning), but at a low DPI. Normally I don't pay much attention to DPI because this number has no meaning if there's no scanning or printing involved. But apparently DPI is a crucial number when it comes to scanning, specifically referring to the resolution at which the image is being scanned. Well, the scans I got back are so unbelievably bad at 100%. They are barely passable at this screen resolution (what you see here is the result of additional sharpening in Photoshop when resizing the image).

And finally what's bad about this picture is the blown out sky at the top. I cropped this picture slightly to minimize the amount of sky you had to look at, but I think it's going to take me a while to get used to using an external light meter and not having any immediate feedback as to whether I've got the exposure right. I might try dual tasking by using my digital camera to take test shots before actually taking a picture with the Mamiya. I got this idea from The Luminous Landscape. (Patty, look! That's your camera they are using!)

Anyway, I am really eager to try more medium format, but I need to figure out a cost effective way to do it. I'm thinking that I'll just get a lab to process and print the photos, but not scan them. I am guessing that my home scanner can produce results that are acceptable for the web, but I haven't fully tested this out yet. At the very least, I really don't think that my home produced scans could be any worse that what I paid for this lab to do.