On behalf of Analog Film Lab, I would like to apologise to gtan, and we can totally understand his anger and frustration with us, just as we are with ourselves. We do treat our work very seriously, and we take a lot of pride in the accuracy of our processing. However, being a largely manual and craft based process, we have made our share of mistakes from time to time.
To provide a background on what has happened with the two incidents: in the first case, the processor halted the processing step at the First Developer stage, causing a over development of the film. Normally the processor would sound off an alarm when it encountered a situation, but this time, no alarm went off. This escaped our attention until it was too late. Since then, we activate a manual timer next to the processor when we fire off the processing, to sound off an alarm at the 6:15min mark to remind us to manually check that processor has moved on to the next stage correctly. The second incident happened when the reel that the roll was loaded didn't get rotated by the centre spindle. This caused only the film in the lower half of the reel to be developed. The result was that we were only able to salvage a fraction of the frames from the whole roll. Strangely, the other 4 rolls in the tank were processed correctly with no issues. We are not too exactly sure of the root cause, but we speculate that it might be due to the reels not being compacted tightly enough in the tank, causing the reel at the end to get stuck to the sidewall. In the future, we will give an additional push to compact the reels tighter, and check that the spindle rotates freely before kicking off the processing.
No amount of explanation and apology is going to ease the disappointment of losing precious memories captured on film. We know, because we are photographers ourselves. We treat everyone's film as preciously as we treat our own, so we get very upset with ourselves when we fail. There were numerous other very precious lessons that we have learnt over the years from other failings, and we are very grateful to have a very forgiving and understanding community that has helped us to come thus far. Whatever expertise that we have today is accumulated on layers of sweat and tears, both yours and ours. Even though we have done thousands of rolls, there are still going to be lessons that we will need to learn, and unexpected situations that we will need to deal with. While we cannot guarantee a zero defect future, we make every effort not to make the same mistake twice.
Thank you guys, for all your support, and we hope to be the high quality film resource that we set out to be.
ls
