wlewisiii
Veteran
Chris, I hope you don't mind me posting this here, but as it came up in your thread, it seemed most appropriate here.
I've been shooting more film again and wanting to find a somewhat more economical approach to it. I can develop at home easily enough with daylight tanks and D-76 and Diafine but scanning has always been the bugbear in the room. Flatbeds have never been worth much for 35mm and good dedicated scanners are more than I can afford. In comes the Chinese made clone of the Nikon ES-2.
It has instructions for lots of AF lenses, naturally, but none for an old Micro-Nikkor 55/3.5 AI manual focus lens. Fortunately, the 55mm filter ring is what was expected by the kit and everything just screwed together fine. Once put together it looks like this:
and attaches to the D810 like any other F mount lens. I have it in my non-cpu lens list, put the camera on A mode, turn on the LED light, and, with focus assist in the viewfinder it's not too hard to figure out quite quickly.
IF it's a decent negative (not a given with me, alas) and technique is correct (that comes along fairly quickly) the scans come out fast and good.
I use ART 1.20.2 for my RAW processing. In the editor's Special Effects Menu is a Film Negative item that allows me to flip the negative to positive and then post process as I desire. The scan samples presented here are with out any additional post processing. They are from a recent experimental roll of Kentmere 400 shot with my Nikon F4 and 28-105/3.5-4.5 af-d zoom:
For the price, this is far and away the best scanning solution I've run into yet. It only arrived yesterday and this is only the first simple test. I have a roll or two to develop here at home that I'll test with later in the week for a more comprehensive experiment but overall, I have a positive feeling about this solution.
I've been shooting more film again and wanting to find a somewhat more economical approach to it. I can develop at home easily enough with daylight tanks and D-76 and Diafine but scanning has always been the bugbear in the room. Flatbeds have never been worth much for 35mm and good dedicated scanners are more than I can afford. In comes the Chinese made clone of the Nikon ES-2.
It has instructions for lots of AF lenses, naturally, but none for an old Micro-Nikkor 55/3.5 AI manual focus lens. Fortunately, the 55mm filter ring is what was expected by the kit and everything just screwed together fine. Once put together it looks like this:
and attaches to the D810 like any other F mount lens. I have it in my non-cpu lens list, put the camera on A mode, turn on the LED light, and, with focus assist in the viewfinder it's not too hard to figure out quite quickly.
IF it's a decent negative (not a given with me, alas) and technique is correct (that comes along fairly quickly) the scans come out fast and good.
I use ART 1.20.2 for my RAW processing. In the editor's Special Effects Menu is a Film Negative item that allows me to flip the negative to positive and then post process as I desire. The scan samples presented here are with out any additional post processing. They are from a recent experimental roll of Kentmere 400 shot with my Nikon F4 and 28-105/3.5-4.5 af-d zoom:
For the price, this is far and away the best scanning solution I've run into yet. It only arrived yesterday and this is only the first simple test. I have a roll or two to develop here at home that I'll test with later in the week for a more comprehensive experiment but overall, I have a positive feeling about this solution.
