David Duane Photography

I read a pair of articles recently (here and here) about how to get a good image capture of a slide or negative without  a dedicated film scanner.  I have a dedicated 35mm film scanner (Nikon 5000 ed), but, I have a bunch of medium format film, which is about 5 times the size of 35mm film, that I haven’t been able to scan.

In short, you need a camera with a very good sensor (resolution and dynamic range), a lens that can resolve great detail and focus very close (macro), a diffused and even light source, a way to keep the film completely flat, and a way to very precisely keep the image sensor and film very close to parallel.

To keep the film flat, I cut holes that are about the same size as the image on the film (6x7cm) in a pair of pieces of cardboard, and sandwiched the film between the cardboard.  With the lens I used (Canon 100mm macro), and the distance I needed to shoot from, I knew that there could only be about 2mm variance in the distance from the film to the sensor.  It took about 20 minutes and quite a bit of experimenting with clamps and “braces” to get the film acceptably flat.

Today was very overcast, which made a bright and evenly diffused light source… Such clouds only come five times a year in the Phoenix area.   I put the camera on a tripod, aimed at the featureless and evenly lit sky, removed as much dust from the negative as possible with a camel hair brush, and put the negative very precisely and evenly aligned on a tripod in front of the camera.

I set the camera to the lowest ISO to capture the most dynamic range and detail possible, and set the aperture to f/14 to get the most depth of field possible without having issues with diffraction.  I had no idea how to expose, so I let the camera pick the shutter speed… 1/30 second, which worked out just fine.

Photographing a negative - alternative to scanning

I opened the RAW file in Adobe Camera Raw (ACR), but had no idea where to set the color balance, or any other settings, so I left the settings at default, and had ACR open the image as a 16-bit file in Photoshop.  Negatives are a “compressed” format, and since I knew that I would be making huge color adjustments in Photoshop, an 8-bit file wouldn’t have had enough information to make smooth color transitions.  .JPG files are 8-bits, and compressed on top of that, so I wouldn’t have been able to get anywhere near the number of colors needed if I had shot a .JPG.  The top image shows what the capture of the negative looks like.  You can see why I had no idea what color corrections to make in ACR.

I inverted the image, which means that colors are switched to their opposite color.  For example, white becomes black, black becomes white, cyan becomes red, red becomes Cyan, magenta becomes green (and vice/versa), and yellow becomes blue (and vice/versa).

The inverted image was very flat, as to be expected.  I could have adjusted the red, green, and blue manually, but, since this was my first try, I used some tools in Photoshop to help me get quickly to something close to correct.  With the White Point tool, I clicked on an item that should be pure white… I chose a white spot on the cabinet that was in the sun.  With the Black Point tool, I clicked something that I knew should be completely black, which was the shadow area of one of the bicycle tires.  I made a manual adjustment to add brightness in the mid-tones.  It’s still a little dark and blue-ish, so, if this was an important image, I would add some red and green to the highlights to brighten the image.

With my 21 megapixel Canon 5D mark II and ultra-sharp lens, the film grain is visible, and the details are sharp.

Basically, I have made a DIY slide duplicator.   I’m very pleased that I have found a way to capture medium format film. I believe I could get excellent results if I took more than a few minutes adjusting colors, and use software to clean up the film grain (or, leave the film grain, for effect).  I think I’ll get an old medium format enlarger film holder, and stick a diffuser on it.

This river radio was shot at the Salt River.  These tubers do it in style!