Somewhere in the Desert

This picture was taken in June 2004 with a $29.95 K-Mart 35mm film camera whose only adjustment was the direction it was pointed.

At that time, the only thing we knew about photography was that a camera was required and we barely met that requirement.

BEFORE: 

We took hundreds of pictures on that trip and mailed the film cartridges to York Studios in West Virginia where we splurged and had them made into 5x7s; little did we know that 4x6 would have been a much better choice for the 2:3 image ratio, as half-an-inch of detail is lost from the long side when printing at 5x7.

In the last few weeks, I have used our old $29.95 HP 2200 "All in One" printer/scanner in a massive effort to digitize a lifetimes worth of printed photographs. (I haven't even made a dent in the pile. After I wade through getting all these prints scanned, a windfall of unexpected cash will allow the purchase of a much better scanner and I will get to do it all over again. A poor man has to do things more than once.)

In squaring up and trimming these scans from the York prints, I have found York's cutter to have been out-of-square by a hair over 1/8" across the width of every last one of these 5x7s, thus causing me to lose another 1/4" of image detail.

Also, in every print, I have found  a "groove", or impression, about a third up from the bottom, that runs the entire length of the print; I cannot see this groove when looking at the actual prints, but it stands out like a red flag when viewing the scans (and NO, it is not a defect on the scanner bed, as the groove remains constant, regardless of print position/orientation on the scanner bed).

I do not know whether this groove was caused by some defect in our professional grade camera, dragging along the film; or, more likely, it was caused by some defect in the automated development process at York; or, it could be a defect in the paper used; whichever is to blame, we have hundreds of images marred by it.

I do not know what caused the primer-red fog on the right edge of the image, but it is actually part of the print and not something that got sprayed on it afterwards; I have seen this same primer-red spot in a few more of these prints. 

AFTER:

The sky was captured 28-September-2014 at my father-in-laws farm; I had never before witnessed such a dramatic and varied display of cloud formations as were visible for about three days that weekend; every cloud type we learned about in grade school was on display at the same time and it did not rain for several days prior nor afterwards.

I think I did pretty good, considering what I had to work with.

Thanks for looking.