ajft

Looks like Schmap would like to use some of my photos for their next map about Melbourne, nothing special, but its the first time anyone has asked to use them! I guess I'll see them on http://www.schmap.com/Melbourne if they do get used.

Its amazing how much wildlife there is around the suburbs, hidden away in the trees and bushes — wildlife that only comes out at night, or when everything is quiet and all the people have gone away. This is the second time in a fortnight that I've seen an owl, or as I discovered once I uploaded the photo from my camera, two owls!

At first I thought these were boobook owls, an identification that one semi-knowledgeable person confirmed. I was later told by another much more knowledgeable person that its a pair of Tawny frogmouths (Podargus strigoides). Either way, they're both types of owls!

Okay, I've collected the CD of my last two rolls of film, that's the last of my 21 rolls of APS film completed, and not before time too! QFL have excelled themselves this time. No, not by missing a frame or some other stuff up like that, this time they've sent me back the CD, two empty APS cartridges, and the exposed film rolled up, squashed and loose in the envelope! How the hell am I meant to get it back into the cartridges?

I'm glad the whole business is over because I doubt very much that I will ever have anything to do with QFL again! Appalling care and attention that the seem to have with everything they do. I rang up to ask them what on earth they were doing and was told I'd have to send the lengths of film and cartridges back so they can have a look at them! Told them no way was I sending any film to them ever again, and have been told that “a service manager will call you back.”

Providing they haven't stuffed the images up as well — I haven't checked fully — after titles and dates and resizing are completed then and #698-464 will be visible here.

Photos

Another week and another three rolls of film completed. Even more amazingly, after two trips back to QFL, they've successfully rescanned all the photos — including the missing two — on the 379-986 roll from a fortnight ago. More date stamps, more titles, resizing and uploading and then #711-119, #855-129 and #902-122 will be here. Only two rolls left!

The end is in sight! Three rolls back on one CD, and the CD that I returned last week to be rescanned — I'll get to that one in a minute. The 2000 Bike NSW Big Ride, a few weeks in Johannesburg, and the miscellaneous cruft that fills in the spaces in between. Once again, there's date stamps and titles to be manually appeneded, then they'll be available for perusal — #647-551, #374-343 and #700-204 — and then there'll only be five rolls to go.

I would have thought that after a phone call last week explaining the problem; then returning a CD that contains 23 images together with a film that contains 25, and a note stating that 2 images were missing would be sufficient to get it rescanned. Apparently not, its been returned with a note stating: “We have checked the CD and all photos appear on this. Do you know which two were missing?” Um, 25 minus 23 is two missing, why can't they find them?

Either I'm going crazy, or the printed index sheet from five years ago shows photos 1 to 25. The CD that I've got here has 23 images, but images #23 and #24 are missing. Surely if I can spot this then so can the staff at QFL? Guess I've got to send it back to them a second time, together with the index print and a note asking them to count to twenty-five...

Over half-way complete in the APS-digitising project. Three more rolls completed, that's thirteen rolls scanned and eight remaining. Annoying though, QFL ignored the request to scan the three films onto one CD, according to the chemist it is completely arbitrary whether they read any instructions at all! The hair on the scanner that I saw a week ago is still there, now that is bugging me. Captions and dates now needed for 201-383, 379-986 and 647-548.

Damn, I'd forgotten that 17 to 44 of the first roll were all out of focus — the Elph had decided that it's auto-focus was broken and ruined all my photos of Rae and Alex's wedding, a camera fault that Canon couldn't find, but must have fixed while they were looking! Oddly too, there appear to be 44 photos on the first roll of 40, 23 images on the second roll of 25! Guess I'll have to check out the prints from back in 2000 and see what happened when they were developed.

More progress on digitising the APS films. Three more rolls of film done, ten done, eleven to go. Now for the laborious task of re-dating them, since the scanning process puts the scan date into the EXIF header, not the photo date that is present in the APS magnetic strip. Once I've added captions and the location information for the ones I'm fairly sure about, they'll appear in my albums: [1], [2] and [3]. There's a scanned hair on every image, somewhere in the lower-left corner, but its not intrusive enough for me to go through the hassles of rejecting the CD and asking them to do it again.

Not a word from Canon on the repairs to my camera! Tomorrow will be another fortnight since I called them, and a month since I dropped it in for repair....