- Joined
- Aug 3, 2001
- Messages
- 7,240
For many years I taught photography courses in and round Pitlochry, including the year the photograph was taken. At the time there was a branch of John Menzie's in Pitlochry which had a one hour developing and printing service, this was the standard C41 which would be used for processing Ilford XP2. The other places that offered d and p were chemist shops that would send the film away and get it back a couple of days later. Fairly easy to develop XP2 at home but if you were doing that you would print it on b and w paper not the colour stock this image was processed on.You can do C-41 (colour) at home (or indeed E6 for slide film!) but generally most people still doing home developing were doing traditional B&W, where there's a long tradition of home developing and printing. The logic of choosing a B&W film to be developed in C-41 is that it would be the process run by any high street commercial lab so was easily accessible and quick.
I find the poaching thing more believable than the 'nude pictures' thing to be honest. I see that the photo analysis gets ever more convoluted, with it now being suggested that the plane is in fact a man and dog in a boat.
XP2 was not the sort of film to be bought by your average holiday snapper, more expensive than a roll of colour negative film, and most people wanted colour pics of their holidays. For someone interested in photography it has advantages, the high street processing, the arty feel of b and w, and a large exposure latitude - its nominal sensitivity was ISO 400 but on the same roll it could be exposed at anything between 50 to 800 and still produce useable photos.