I began out in movie and I’ve a giant assortment of analog negatives and transparencies, significantly 35mm black-and-white negatives. There are nonetheless some good pictures in there however digitizing them to an honest high quality has proved time-consuming and costly.
I’ve tried flatbed scanners with transparency adaptors, however A4 scanners aren’t capable of resolve the extraordinarily high-quality element in 35mm originals – even scanners designed particularly for photographers.
So what about movie scanners, that are designed particularly for 35mm negatives? These are costly and getting tougher to seek out. Nikon no longer makes CoolScan film scanners, my Minolta DiMage Scan Elite 5400 II bit the dust long ago, and both were slow to use. Even the best film scanners can be hard work.
That’s the technical approach. But my new approach owes more to the kitchen table than the physics lab.
A photographer friend convinced me to try it out. He uses a copy stand, a lightbox and a camera with a macro lens. I don’t have a lightbox, so I use a Joby light with a diffuse front panel as a lightbox on my kitchen table, a tripod, my Olympus PEN E-P7 and an Olympus M.Zuiko 60mm Macro lens with a hood to keep any flare from the lamp to a minimum.
Honestly, the whole thing has proved so quick and simple that it’s made me start looking again at the best film cameras, since I do think analog film has a special character that is very difficult to match with a digital camera.
The trick is to position the camera very carefully so that it’s exactly perpendicular to the film, and then to move the film and not the camera as you go from one negative to the next.
So does the 20MP Micro Four Thirds sensor of my E-P7 have the resolution and dynamic range to do justice to my 35mm negatives? Easily! Here’s why.
First, analog movie doesn’t have the decision of digital sensors. The E-P7’s sensor can simply resolve even the best grain in my negatives.
Second, analog negatives shouldn’t have the form of excessive tonal vary you may think. Film can seize an especially broad brightness vary, nevertheless it compresses it right into a narrower vary within the negs. As a consequence, my E-P7 can simply accommodate the tonal vary of my negs, and I sometimes must ‘expand’ it modifying to revive full black-and-white values.
With this setup I can ‘scan’ an entire 36-exposure movie in round 10-Quarter-hour, extract each ounce of picture high quality from my negatives and I don’t even get the mud points that used to plague my movie scans.
So, that is the weirdest factor – it’s taken a contemporary mirrorless digital camera to deliver again my previous analog negatives into my digital workflow. I’ve even purchased movie for the primary time in 20 years!
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