I saw this rainy sunset just after cooking dinner at my campsite at Valley View Hot Springs in Colorado, a wonderfully serene place. The sunset was almost salmon colored, because of the smoke from numerous wildfires throughout the west during the late summer of 2000.
This photo provides a good illustration of how a decent photo can be ruined by an automated photo lab. The top version is a raw scan from the negative, with no correction of color, contrast, or brightness. Above is the photo I saw through the viewfinder; I wanted to capture the wispy details of the rain falling through the beams of light. When I took the photo, I metered off the wispy areas, because I wanted them to turn out medium toned with lots of detail. A large print made from the high-resolution scan shows much more subtle detail in those wisps than the above low-resolution jpeg shows, but you get the idea.
In contrast, here's an uncompensated scan of the print I got back from the photo lab. The lab "fixed" my print to get rid of the salmon cast caused by the smoke, replacing it with a cyan cast. They also "fixed" my "underexposure". They lightened it up too much. Their version captured some details in the dark valley floor, but at the expense of all the wonderful details in the clouds and rain. When I got this print back, I wasn't sure why I had bothered snapping that photo. It wasn't until I scanned the negative that I rediscovered the beauty of the sunset I saw that evening.
By adjusting the scanner settings, I could, if I wanted, scan the negative and get a pretty accurate facsimile of the bottom image. But the reverse isn't true. I could scan the print and adjust the overall color back to fairly closely match the original scene as seen in the negative, but there's no way I could scan that washed-out print and reproduce all the delicate shades of detail that were in main portion of the negative. This is the advantage of a negative scanner over a flatbed scanner for someone who doesn't have access to a color darkroom.
If you're serious about photography, don't ever let a machine decide how to print your pictures! Either shoot slides, do your own darkroom work, or scan your negatives and learn to use PhotoShop.
Date: August 14, 2000.
Camera: Nikon F3.
Lens: 105mm f2.8 Micro Nikkor.
Film: Kodak Royal Gold 100.
Exposure: unrecorded
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