Not very helpful. The reason to make photographs using film as the recording mechanism is to obtain the look, feel, and defects of photosensitive film + processing, which cannot be wholly replicated by image processing of digital captures. It can, however, be captured and visible in digitized (scanned) film images.
This is why I've put a lot of time and money into restoring some favorite film cameras, and refining my digital capture technique, over the past 30 years. I feel confident now that I can pick up any of my cameras, film or digital, make my exposures, and achieve the look and feel that I expected in my printed and web-display photographs.
I've been scanning film for over thirty years now. I re-scanned all the film that I exposed in the first half of that time with my current techniques and found some excellent improvements in representing the film image with high fidelity, but anything scanned since about 2010 shows little to no improvements ... That tells me my scanning technique is as good as I'm ever going to need.
G
I've hung on to most (okay, many) of my film cameras as well. If for no other reason than they mean something to me, I started in film in 1961 which dates me firmly in the Jurassic Age, and while I nowadays do most of my photography (for the convenience of it) with digital Nikons, my Rolleiflexes, Nikons, Contax G, Leica ltm and other odd-bod cameras have a firm place in my heart, and every now and then in my hands as I try to run at least one roll of film in each camera at least one time every year.
I like digital colors, but film, especially B&W, has something (or some things) I just cannot duplicate with pixels. Mid tones for one. Anyone who has read my past posts may recall I'm madly keen on mid tones (as befits a good architect who is trained to observe how light falls on a building, to enhance the lighting and temperature for the exterior and interior.
This year I'm preparing to rescan a few thousand prized negatives I originally scanned in the 'noughties' (= late 2000s) when I bought my first scanner, a Canon something with pitifully small scan quality, as well as during the Covid lockdown period in Australia when I had finally bought much better scanners but didn't bother to do more than the most basic research on the process. Now I must redo many images for poor quality reasons. I reckon I either I had too much good wine before and during those first scanning sessions, or I didn't really pay much attention to my settings and just let things slide, as I'm prone to do on so many things I dislike doing. So I let the scanners do what they did while I busied myself with other chores. A lesson seemingly never learned in my case.
I'm now rereading a large archive of data and information I've kept to bring my old and tired brain up-to-date on scanning techniques.
This time, I'll be doing my negs one by one and doing two or even three scans to try to get the optimum quality from my new cans. And cutting back on the wine (this for age and health reasons as well as to keep my 'scientific' brain cells nicely sharp and focused on what I'm doing, or maybe trying to do.)
Hoping all will wish me the very best of luck on this. My goal is to keep scanning at least until I'm hit the age of 96, when I hope to finally retire to a rocking chair with the house cat on my lap and delve into my hoard of good Australian and French reds. If I can still hold a glass, let alone wield a corkscrew...
