Posted by Neil in Photographs, Photography on Friday, April 24, 2009 | Comments Off 
Regular followers of my blog will have noticed that there has been a marked down turn in the frequency of posts of late. The main reason for this is not sheer laziness as some will have assumed, but I’ve taken the plunge and gone and got myself a MacBook Pro.
While fathoming out how to use the machine, install software, tweak preferences etc was a fairly straight forward process, finding alternatives to some of the Windows based software that I was used to using has proved somewhat more challenging. I used to use Windows Live Writer (www.live.com) to write blog posts, and I was extremely happy with this piece of software. It did exactly what I wanted and more. It was reliable and the UI was first class.
After a great deal of research, and trying to find some blogging software for OSX that will work with DasBlog, I ended up going with ecto (illuminex.com). It has a cool UI, and all the functionality that I want appears to be there. Unfortunately I just cannot get it to publish articles to my blog and herein lies the reason for the delays. I had toyed with changing from DasBlog to WordPress, but after reading that several other bloggers had tried this and it proved to be a very protracted process, I decided that it was best to leave it as it was (I’m very happy with DasBlog) and find an application that I can use.
I’ve put calls into support, posted to forums, scoured the net but at this stage I’m none the wiser. So I’m just warning you guys that posts may not be as frequent as I would like for the time being.
OK. Enough of the crap, now let’s get down to some photography…..
It’s been killing me not shooting any film lately, so I whacked a roll of T-Max in my Lomo a week or so ago and shot some night street stuff, all pretty much from the hip. Once I’d finished the roll, it dawned on me that I was actually out of T-Max dev. So after a few days of carrying the spent films around in my pocket trying to track down some developer, I ended up popping into DS Colour Labs in Didsbury and getting them to process it. The guys in the store explained that they didn’t use the Kodak developer, but did use one that wasn’t all that different.
So when I went to pick them up a couple of days later, I was really disappointed! The negs & scans were so washed out and completely lacking in grain. The reason I love Kodak’s T-Max is the high contrast, fine grain gritiness that this film produces and these qualities are further enhanced by developing this film in the chemicals that Kodak have produced to go with it. So when I saw DS Colour Labs attempt, it prompted me to get straight onto Silverprint and order a job lot of T-Max dev! Don’t get me wrong, I’m not knocking DS – I understand that they have a business to run, and it would be totally uneconomical for them to have developed the roll in T-Max. I just learnt a valuable lesson – if you want something doing properly, then do it yourself!!!
Fortunately all was not last, and Nik software managed to save the day. I just adore the Silver Efex software and after processing the roll as T-Max in Silver Efex I had managed to pretty much save the film. Here is a frame as it was originally processed. 
And here is the same frame after processing with Silver Efex – see the difference!! 
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OK. Enough of the crap, now let’s get down to some photography….. 
And here is the same frame after processing with Silver Efex – see the difference!! 
