I set up a little semi-permanent copy stand/film copier set up in one corner of the office. I'm starting to "scan" medium format, black and white film from the past.This image is my first try. It's a photo I took with a 6x6 cm camera onto Tri-X film many, many years ago. The subject is "Lou" and the location is the gardens at Laguna Gloria Museum.
The whole set up is quite simple. I bought a small but well made copy stand, attached a Sigma fp camera fitted out with a Sigma 70mm f2.8 macro lens (Art Series). The lens was set at f5.6 and I let the camera select the shutter speed via A priority. Then I used the exposure compensation control to get the tones I wanted. Set the camera to shoot DNG files and to have a 2 second self-timer.
When I brought the file into Photoshop I merely clicked on "invert" in the adjustments menu and I was presented with a flat but pretty well detailed image file. I opened levels and used the black eyedropper tool to sample the space between frames (which should print black if you were doing this in a conventional dark room) and then adjusted the highlight and mid-tones to taste.
Because it's film I did have to spot out a few dust spots with the little "band-aide" icon. I sharpened the parts of the frame that I thought needed it, letting the photo spirits guide me. And then, with the click of a button, the photograph appeared on my desktop. Time elapsed? About five minutes. I think it's not bad for a first try. Might need to find a sharper negative though. I think I just missed getting the focus on her face...
8 comments:
Is it possible that your eye is overtrained by hi-res digital? That's about as good as it gets with Tri-X. You can see strands of her hair faling down over her eye, and the lines between her teeth. Or maybe my eye is undertrained...
Entirely possible! And alternately maybe film wasn't as good as current digital stuff, especially when copied as I have done it.
Hi Kirk,
This looks like a really good idea. How are illuminating the negative? From beneath with an LED?
Rick
Looks pretty good to me. The ribs on the collar look sharp. Film flatness is hyper critical when digi scanning. I've been using a Nikon D800e and Nikkor 60mm macro lens at f8.
Keep at it, I look forward to seeing more of your b&w film work. Color stuff too.
Eric
Kirk, what did you use to hold the negatives flat and what kind of light box did you use? I'm considering setting up a similar rig. Thanks!
I use a similar setup and workflow. For others who would like to give it a try, and in addition to Kirk's best practices, I suggest using a mirror placed below the lens to center/collimate the sensor plane with the film plane, using a negative carrier with anti-Newton ring glass to hold the film flat, and an LED light panel with front diffusion as the light source. I place the light panel a few inches behind the film to make sure the light is diffuse and out of focus. An LED panel with adjustable color temperature is helpful for copying color images.
Regardless of how sharp the resulting copy may appear, if the film grain in the resulting scan is sharp from center-to-edge and from center-to-corners then the copy is as sharp as it can possibly get. From what I can tell, Kirk's copy meets that metric.
As a final note, make sure your setup is rigid and shake-free, especially when copying 35mm images. The higher your magnification, the more that vibration and mirror-slap (for DSLR users) become a factor and the more important it is to make sure the image planes remain parallel.
Finding and cleaning dust spots on scanned negatives/slides would be an excellent application for AI.
Thanks, Gordon.
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