Photography

So I’ve been thinking that I want to take pictures again, at least on a somewhat limited scale for the blog. I don’t have my own digital camera and don’t particularly want to get one at this point.

I do have a really sweet old, manual everything, Nikon that I’m thinking about using. This brings up the following question that I’d like to ask the crowd…

Does anyone know of a good mail order photo processing service that will:

• Develop film and send my negatives back to me.
• Scan the negatives and send me a digital copies of the images, either via the Internet, or by post on CD-ROM.
• Not send me prints, or make me pay for prints.
• I’m looking for digital scans of really high quality. I mean this is film we’re copying off of, and scanning technology is good and bits are cheap. So I think 10 megapixel+ images are pretty reasonable. TIFF or some other uncompressed file format is pretty much required.
• Do this for a competitive price. Service should provide mailers, and I think the total cost should be 5 bucks or less, I think 3-4 is the sweet spot.
• If there was a company that could do this with either black and white or color film, that would be amazing, but I suppose not strictly required. I’ve discovered that my favorite B&W film of yore has been discontinued (Agfapan Pro/APX-100,) so it’s of minimal importance.

If such a service exists that pictures are about 20 cents each, including film, which doesn’t seem too bad. Though you pay a lot for a digital camera up front, and given that I’m largely not interested in producing hard copies of photos, but I enjoy the experience of shooting to film, I think the economy is pretty much the same. Particularly since I have such an awesome camera already. Figure a good 10mp digital camera is several hundred dollars, I’d have to take 1500-2000 pictures before the price of the new camera would really outweigh the cost of processing. Which would take me several years, given my level of involvement. And then you have to figure and you have to figure that like all such technology, after a few years you (or I) might start thinking about an upgrade, which means that price might be a non-issue in the end.

If such a service exists.