Re: [Leica] can't beat the minilab

[Mark Rabiner <mrabiner@concentric.net>]

Alan Ball wrote:
snip
This has been and interesting interchange.
Your first one though was a wrong guess, I was being tongue in cheek,
personal looks of course count for nothing only experience and the care
for quality. I don't have peircings but I am a long hair and mothers
with kids cross the street when they see me coming.
I was talking about the minimum rate workforce who live with their
parents and are going through raging puberty. Yes, I am not comfortable
with handing my film to them. If they get fired they are not going to be
sleeping in the alley they go home to thier parents house.
Snapshots to define my terms: are a stack of 4 by 6's in a paper thing
with the Negs cut in 4's in a plastic thing at the back.

At the bookstore they were selling a non book, a classy looking box with
a stack of well printed cards in black and white with large borders all
from a major photographic cellection of a major museum. It was or is a
classy package. What if they did the opposite? What if instead of a
classy box they used a pseudo envelope like you get from the minilab
except on the outside of it is says instead of "Quick Stop Photo" it
said "Masterpieces of the Masters" and inside were a stack of 4 by 6's
with no borders of corse of "Moonrise over H..." and 36 others of the
same ridiculously pristine ilk? How would it feel in hand? How would
they look when you spread them out on the card table? Enough to make you
throw your camera away like HCB and take up the pencil. (My Grandma
would say get in the pencil business but she was referring to an
economic state)

So as I write this I realize "borderless" is a term or issue which gets
me or matters to me.
The quality in all it's gaudy wonderfullness is not an issue for me. You
can't count on it, but its often there. Density and color balance have
been calculated to perfection according to algorithms I could only
imagine. I can't claim to be anti C-41.
In a way we're lucky here in Portland Oregon because we have a Rental
Lab called U develop where I can rent an 8 by 10 enlarger and make an
enlarged "contact" sheet from a roll of film run threw a more trusted
minilab. Yes I use them! If they repeatedly don't scratch or cut up my
Negs I can let the thing at Kinko's run them and I can come back in a
half an hour and pick up the long strips.
You are using the minilab as an option among other intelligent options,
its not as if  you are not aware of them you are just keeping things in
balance for every thing a season and so on... shooting K25 and 64 and
Velveta. The minilab thing just makes me cringe for me to make these
value statements for someone else on the long run isn't going to work. I
have walked into peoples houses and seen on the wall unexpectedly my
work, borderless machine prints and cringed and at one point decided
that for me that was going to stop happening and that I was going to
regain control over my work. I did so and that was about ten years ago.
So I had ten years before that of different "levels" of work.
Mark Rabiner