Film day at the office. A scan from a black and white negative.

I was going on and on about how easy and how high quality it is to "scan" older, medium format film with my current copy set-up. Basically just a camera, a lens, a copy stand and a light source. My mentor, Henry White, stopped me in my tracks. He said, "This is photography not performance art. Don't 'tell' me, show me!" 

I selected a 6cm by 6cm "monochrome" negative from a stack near the scanning table, cleaned it off and put it into the Negative Supply Company film holder, put that on the very well color corrected light source, focused my 70mm macro lens and shot a frame in one of my favorite cameras which was anchored on a copy stand. 

This was a bit of a  torture test for the whole system because the negative we chose was an Agfapan 25 APX film sample. It's a film that's inherently very contrasty. It's a very high resolution film and the way I developed it back in the day added to its overall contrast. All that being said, the scanning set up seems perfect for preserving highlight detail (if there is any) in black and white films. Even in the most egregious samples.

I brought the images into Lightroom Classic where I inverted the image from a negative to a positive and then created a curve for the file that would render skin tones exactly the way I wanted them. Dust spotting then ensued (some things never change....).

The distinquished Dr. White, a veteran of decades of work in darkrooms, and behind all manner of cameras, jumped out of his seat and yelled, "This is witchcraft. It's trickery. Digital copies of negatives are supposed to suck. This is supposed to be hard." But it was evident to him that "scanning" older black and white negatives in order to use them in the digital space could be both very high quality, cheap and quick. Choose any three. Oh hell, choose all three. 

And then it dawned on both of us that people called "bloggers" make everything seem much harder than it really is so they have something weighty and somewhat mysterious (to people who've never had to scan film before. Or people who have never shot film in their lives) in order to generate reams of dark magic folderol to write about. 

Later, in a parking lot at the nearest photo lab we did a ritual burning and sledgehammer destruction of several older film scanners. They were very much tools of oppression and unrewarding labor. 

As Mrs. Lovich, my creative writing about mathematics teacher always said: "Show your work!" 

Show your work indeed!

A note to writers: if you are discussing photography then show pictures or "it didn't happen."