dclark Offline Upload & Sell: On
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p.1 #9 · p.1 #9 · Seeking guidance with old family negatives | |
Taperwing wrote:
To add a little to Dave's excellent info.
I've done scans on dedicated film scanners, flatbed scanners, and now, using my camera as a direct copy device. I've become quite fond of the speed and quality of using my camera, although all of my experience is with color slides and B&W negatives. However, doing a search on "color negative inversion photoshop" will bring up several work flows to try.
For bulk scanning, I like the idea of using clear negative sheets covered by a sheet of glass, over a backlight panel. All of my old negatives and slides are in such sheets. Need to work in a darkened room to eliminate frontside glare.
For more detailed scans, I use old enlarger negative carriers. Doesn't make too much difference whose they are, as long as they can be laid flat on your light panel.
If you are really going to make a go of this, it is incredibly helpful to have a copy stand available. I have a Kaiser RS2, which truthfully is silly expensive for what it is. Such a device makes it easy to keep the optical axis of your camera orthogonal to what you are trying to image and allows for easy height (scaling) adjustment. If mechanically handy, it would be easy to repurpose an enlarger mechanism and base as a copy stand.
To start, you can do far worse than finding an old MF Nikkor 55/2.8, or AF Nikkor 60/2.8 and adapting to whatever mirrorless system you care to use. They are flat field corrected, which is important for this work. Just set at f/8 and go to town....Show more →
I did forget to mention the need to block room lights a bit to avoid glare. I just wrapped a cloth around the tripod legs and that worked great.
For high res scans of film the setup using the Nikon ES-2 is great, but does require some work to adapt it to your macro lens. Your suggestion of a copy stand is a good alternative. It would be possible to adapt the method used to make contact prints by building a platform to move the Slimlite up to the 1:1 working distance of the macro lens. Taping some wood guides onto the Slimlite to align the film holder should make it possible to quickly make 1:1 images of the negatives. That is not as fast or stable as the ES-2 setup but it should be pretty quick.
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