once again, not specifically a black and white question. i hope no one minds.

i'm about to start an ilfochrome printing class. for this class, i'lll be printing some transparencies i already have, plus shooting some new ones. my question is this:

is there any reason that i want to have the lab cut and mount the slides for me? or can i just get them "processed only," the cheapest option, and cut and put them in negative sleeves myself?

i can't think of any good reason that i *need* them to be mounted, especially if i'm not going to be running them through a slide projector.

thanks.

-- brad daly (bwdaly@hiwaay.net), March 02, 2000

Answers

Whatever works best for you. Personally I mount all of my transparencies. The reason is that it allows me to store and organize them individually. I can put all similar images into the same storage sheets and then if I am looking for an image of a back lit cattail I go to the sheets that store cattail images and find the one I am after instead of having to search though piles of stored sheets because I remember that two years ago I shot an image but I cant quite remember exactly when it was. When I first started out, I used to keep all the slides from a roll of film together, but that quickly got out of hand. Now I group according to subject, or in a few cases I keep a specific sequence of slides together because they are telling a story.

That said, I do keep entire rolls of negatives intact and organized by roll. But for the most part I blast most of if not the entire roll on one subject and so I am still organizing by subject more or less.

-- Fritz M. Brown (brownf@idhw.state.id.us), March 03, 2000.