The bright side of home scanning

[EliasK]

Most of us think that scanning is boring and sometimes tricky. But scanners can bring life to images we thought were useless or failures.
Fifteen years ago I used a disposable underwater camera to shoot my wife and our dog (who liked more swimming than walking) at the beach. A little after sunrise, we had a storm while swimming.

The film was developed by a lab which (probably fooled by the unusual uw colors) produced awfully underexposed grainy prints that went immediately to the garbage can. I thought then that this was because of the crappy camera loaded with cheap film.

Fortunately I put the negatives in drawer, and yesterday I discovered them in a cleanup. These came out of the V700:



more embarrassing the fact that possessing some good cameras and lenses, the first time I had 18 "keepers" out of an 24 exp film was from a disposable camera!

 

[sojournerphoto]

What a lovely find. I have concluded that these are the great things about photography.

Mike

 

[amateriat]

Word. 🙂

I don't quite get the scanning-is-boring bit. I'm almost as jazzed byu the process as I was when I brought home my very first film scanner (a second-hand Nikon Coolscan LS-10) twelve years ago. I've been doing some intense scanning over the last few days (just uploaded a handful of images to the Gallery) and made a few test prints as well.

Ninth Street from El, Brooklyn, NY, Oct. 16th, 2010


I suppose it's easy to get spoiled and jaded with all the tech toys we have at our disposal now, but this was like discovering how to make rocket fuel without a NASA budget. (It does help that all this hardware ultimately paid for itself in various ways.)


- Barrett

 

[Damaso]

Word. 🙂

I don't quite get the scanning-is-boring bit. I'm almost as jazzed byu the process as I was when I brought home my very first film scanner (a second-hand Nikon Coolscan LS-10) twelve years ago. I've been doing some intense scanning over the last few days (just uploaded a handful of images to the Gallery) and made a few test prints as well.


Ninth Street from El, Brooklyn, NY, Oct. 16th, 2010


I suppose it's easy to get spoiled and jaded with all the tech toys we have at our disposal now, but this was like discovering how to make rocket fuel without a NASA budget. (It does help that all this hardware ultimately paid for itself in various ways.)


- Barrett

When you have a couple of hundred images to scan it gets mighty boring! I also find that most b&w pics don't look that nice straight out of the scanner...

 

[oftheherd]

EliasK - those are great photos. What a wonderful find and recovery. The photos show up a little small from your flickr site, but seem to have good color and a lack of grain. Well done.

With my skills in scanning, I can have great negatives and not do that well.

 

[bennyng]

Nice. It always nice to know that an image that you've written off is actually still quite good when given a second chance.

Cheers,

 

[Steve_F]

EliasK, I understand how you feel about the find. I was clearing some space at mothers for her and we found a large box full of Kodachrome boxes. These are Over 44 years of age of my parents before I was born and me and brothers and sisters as children. They look they were taken yesterday.
My mother doesn't like to look as she was in her 20's and somewhat slimmer, my father is wearing what are affectionately known as 'Buddy Holly' spectacles, although his style is slightly more modern now!
The slides were taken on a voigtlander fixed lens. Strangely I didn't give a damn about lens performance!
This is why I'm shooting more slides than digital of my children. If they find a hard drive in forty or more years....
Somewhere in the house there are some negatives that my father took of the band that went on to become 'The Hollies', when he was at Manchester University (UMIST) in the very early 60's.

Steve.

 

[bigeye]

Great save - they came out very good.

(My Labs have always tried to climb on my head when I swim with them, usually clawing the heck out of me if I let them get too close. I have a little push move to keep them away. One of them was a pretty good body surfer, too.)

- Charlie

 

[patois]

I will also agree with that! I sent some film to mpix a while ago and the scans came back AWFUL. I finally got around to scanning them and they came out amazing! I was so happy!

 

[robklurfield]

I can't say that scanning is anything but boring, but I do get juiced when I see my images begin to emerge. it may lack the smell of wet printing, but there's still a small thrill when the picture goes from latent to actual. I'm especially enjoying my stash of nearly 30-year old negatives and slides re-emerging from oblivion (scratches, dust and all). It's like awakening from a coma.

 

[Mcary]

On a whim I decided to have the lab scan the two rolls of Fuji Pro 400H I shoot this past weekend as the scans they produce are about close to 29MPs while the ones I get from my Minolta IV are closer to 13MPs. Now in the past say about a year ago the scans I've gotten from them were of excellent quality so when I imported these files into LR I was rather surprised to see that these scans had zero detail in the shadow areas(models dark hair). A first I thought boy did you screw up but then I thought but none the rolls of B&W that I shot at the same location had these problems so I deleted on the scans from the lap and decide to try scanning a few frames on my Minolta. Now I freely admit that it appear that I underexposed by about 3/4 of a stop, BUT a quick click of the Auto WB revealed plenty of detail in the models hair. Then a +50-75 increase in the exposure slider plus a bit of fill light slider gave me nice even histogram with out introducing excess noise to the image.
Note the scans from the lab were 8bit JPEG while the ones I did were 16Bit TIFF which I'm sure make a difference but,,,,,,,

Note work safe http://www.communityzoe.com/albums/Mcary/1288360353.jpg

Note work safe http://www.communityzoe.com/albums/Mcary/1288360428.jpg