yaysnow

It was nice to have the snow back, if only for a day. When poking through my box of old pictures I found those I'd taken in amazement in 1995 when returning from parentville after the spring eggtude-holiday to find the hill covered in snow despite it being calendrically spring. Hopefully there'll be some sort of free time/snow interaction at some point this year with enough warning to enable me to hire a board and remember where the hell I put my salopettes beforehand. I saw them briefly the other day when rummaging through boxes to find excess clothes which could be safely put in long-term storage but they are no longer where I thought I'd put them. I found the all-weather trousers I used to use for snowboarding but they're far from ideal seeing as they came from an all-weather suit my dad acquired from work, and which was baggy on him in one of his larger phases. They would stay up with the help of two belts but were far from comfortable and about as far from non-ridiculous-looking as is possible for any pair of trousers without a hoop around the waist and loosely-elasticated braces.

After popping once more (hopefully for the last time) to Trumps, retrieving the film on which this was shot and safely storing the negatives in my bag I then raised the issue of the try-again scans from the last film still being shite despite the "best scans possible" instructions on the wee envelope the disc was handed to me in, though in retrospect this could have been a disclaimer from the operative who burnt them. There was possibly a little less JPEG-style artefaction on the worst-affected image but there was still some where and that just shouldn't happen if they are (as they claim) creating the TIFFs directly from the scan. There was still way too much sharpening and overdone contrast-enhancement but apparently no way of turning it off. The results were different from those from A&M but still not particularly accurate depictions of what was on the negatives. Whereas I'd probably use A&M again for processing-only I don't think I'd say the same for Trumps as both films have big kinks in, probably where they've been clipped up to dry half-way down the film rather than hung by one end as is normal. They were quicker to offer a refund than A&M but this could have been down to the operative. He ended up mistakenly refunding me for the entire cost of developing and scanning whereas I'd said I'd pay for the processing, so when I next have the change to hand I shall pop the cash back through their door, despite the bent negative strips, large amount of time wasted trundling back and forth and the amount of ink and paper used in producing prints from their scans and my reproductions to wave at them to demonstrate their errors.