There were many things I didn’t like about working in London: the long commute in, the bloody tube, the long commute home, the expense…

But then there are the things I miss. Here’s a small example.

I used to send my negatives to Metro Imaging to be developed and contact printed. Back in the Fat Times I had an account, so I’d phone them up and an hour or so later a courier would appear at reception, pick up my films and haul ‘em off to Clerkenwell. The next day, another courier would arrive with my contacts and the negatives all neatly filed. The service was (and presumably still is) exemplary, with no extra charge for their couriers (they were reassuringly expensive in the first place). In all the time I used Metro I never got anything back where the standard of work was less than excellent. Okay, there was one time they cross processed a roll of slide film as C41, but I’d dropped it off at the C41 desk and not the E6 desk and I hadn’t given them correct instructions—they waived that charge immediately without any hassle though.

Maybe I’ve been spoiled, but if you’re going to call yourself a pro lab then the very minimum you should be providing to your customers is a guarantee of clean negs and no quibbles when things go wrong.

Then I moved to Newcastle. I might be using the wrong lab, but there appears to be only one pro lab in town that handles black and white. And in the last 10 or so rolls of film they’ve handled, 80% of them have come back covered in dust, drying marks or both. 5 of those rolls were from my stepdaughter’s wedding. Almost every image I’ve scanned has needed substantial work with PhotoShop’s (marvellous) healing brush before they were fit to be put on Flickr. When I raised this with them, expecting a grovelling apology and a full refund, the first response I got was positively confrontational and I only ever managed to get a 40% discount on the spoiled films.

I had initially thought that it was only the wedding films that had been screwed and they’d mended their ways, but over the past couple of days I’ve finally got round to scanning in some photos I took on St George’s day, and there’s those drying marks again, which means an extra 30 minutes per image (and probably more needed, this was pretty quick and dirty).

So, if you’re reading this in the north east and you shoot on black and white film, who do you use for dev and print? Or maybe I should just see if Metro will let me mail my film to them. I’ve got another five rolls of unprocessed film and I don’t want the pain of drying marks again. Nor do I want the hassle of learning to do it myself with so little space in the flat.