Godfrey
somewhat colored
Hmm. Copy equipment and technique notes...
Writing all this stuff makes the process seem very demanding. Once you have developed your skills, however, it's actually all pretty quick and easy: all the heavy work is in the setup. After that, it's just shuttle the negs through the carrier being careful while doing so not to move the setup. 🙂
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- The Novoflex Magic system copy stand I use is very, very stable. The table I use for setting up the copying is also extremely square and stable.
- I use a laser level and a drop line to absolutely align camera and negative stage. It's measurably more accurate than the mirror trick for alignment, and is also much, much faster in doing the job.
- My current copy cameras are the Leica CL (24 Mpixel, which I use mostly for 35mm and smaller formats) and the Hasselblad 907x (50 Mpixel, which I use mostly for 645 to 6x9 cm and Polaroid prints). Both have excellent sensors (excellent dynamic range at ISO 200) with extremely effective focusing aids.
- For both cameras, I use either the Leitz Macro-Elmarit-R 60mm f/2.8 or Leitz Macro-Elmar-R 100mm f/4 + Leitz Focusing Bellows-R. (I also capture Minox 8x11mm format negatives, and there I've found that the Leitz Summicron-R 50mm f/2 does a better job at magnifications greater than 1:1 than either of the two macro lenses.) None of the seven or eight other lenses (macro, enlarging, whatever) I tested proved to produce better results than these three lenses.
- I use a Novoflex geared focusing rail with the 60mm macro lens. The Leitz Focusing Bellows-R has its own geared focusing rail built in.
- In my experience doing this (now thirty years long...), I've found autofocus to do nothing but get in the way when I've had it available. The setup I have is stable enough and holds the negatives flat enough, and stably enough, that I manually focus once at set up time and don't change it again for an entire session. With careful setup, I get excellent rendering of grain from center to corner on all formats, which says that the lenses and the film are a good match in terms of how the negs are being held and how the lens' focusing field curvature are matched.
- Generally speaking, it seems better to use a capture format that is smaller than the negative format. This permits you to work in the 1:2.5 to 1:1.5 range, not constantly locked into exactly 1:1 for 35mm format, and allows much more flexibility in focusing, framing, and DoF. Most lenses do slightly better at these magnifications than at 1:1 or higher magnification; the Summicron-R 50mm performance was a surprising find.
- At base ISO, the differences in capture dynamic range between APS-C and FF are not observable although they might be measurable; the difference in capture dynamic range between either of those and the Hasselblad 907x sensor is much greater, with the Hasselblad winning by a very noticeable, observable margin. Great for those contrasty negatives and slides! The best part of using APS-C to capture 35mm to Minox format is that you need less magnification to nearly fill the frame than you do with FF or MFD formats.. This means less extension needed, less height on the copy stand, and tends to produce less camera vibration for sharper results.
- Always lock down the white balance to a fixed setting ... It makes it much much easier to adjust batches of negatives to 'get in the ballpark' on rendering.
Writing all this stuff makes the process seem very demanding. Once you have developed your skills, however, it's actually all pretty quick and easy: all the heavy work is in the setup. After that, it's just shuttle the negs through the carrier being careful while doing so not to move the setup. 🙂
G
