Lately I've been spending a lot of time going through old files, in preparation (or procrastination!) for creating my tenure portfolio. I stumbled on a folder of negatives from ca. 2006-07 that I've never really looked at. Here are some shots from one roll of film. There are plenty more where that came from! One day I'll get the chance to scan all that stuff and do something with it. Until then, here is a taste.
I copied these by photographing the black and white film on a light table with my DSLR, then reversing the tones and applying curves in Photoshop, before a final trip to Adobe Lightroom for cataloging, final tweaks and export to what you can see here. I've heard that this is not a good way to transfer film to digital, but it seems to work pretty well for black and white. I'm pretty sure that the 24.5 megapixel sensor and the old but razor sharp Maxxum 50mm f/2.8 macro lens captures more detail than the original film negative shot on a Yashica 35mm point and shoot was able to resolve. The tonal conversion is pretty tricky, though. The digital sensor seems to have a lot more dynamic range than the film, so the images look very flat when converted. I have to do a pretty radical curve adjustment to bring the images into any kind of pleasing range. I was worried about tonal banding, the way I was torturing these files, but the 16 bit raw conversion seems to withstand this kind of abuse with grace. In the end the rendition looks pretty "film-like" to me. The good thing about this process is that it seems to give a lot more control over the tonal distribution than I would have by darkroom printing, or even by using a film scanner. I don't have any objective measure of this, but visually, the DSLR sensor has much more dynamic range than my Nikon film scanner. Some of these negs are pretty thin, and the shadows would have been lost with any sort of conventional darkroom printing or scanning technique. Here I'm able to pull every last iota of detail from the shadows, while still allowing a nice rich black & full contrast image. In some cases I used a Lightroom adjustment then to obscure some of that detail to increase the dramatic effect. I don't think that scanning these negs would preserve that level of shadow detail. In any case, what was meant to be a quick and dirty way to look at some old film proved to be a very useful, fast and flexible way to transfer film to digital.
I copied these by photographing the black and white film on a light table with my DSLR, then reversing the tones and applying curves in Photoshop, before a final trip to Adobe Lightroom for cataloging, final tweaks and export to what you can see here. I've heard that this is not a good way to transfer film to digital, but it seems to work pretty well for black and white. I'm pretty sure that the 24.5 megapixel sensor and the old but razor sharp Maxxum 50mm f/2.8 macro lens captures more detail than the original film negative shot on a Yashica 35mm point and shoot was able to resolve. The tonal conversion is pretty tricky, though. The digital sensor seems to have a lot more dynamic range than the film, so the images look very flat when converted. I have to do a pretty radical curve adjustment to bring the images into any kind of pleasing range. I was worried about tonal banding, the way I was torturing these files, but the 16 bit raw conversion seems to withstand this kind of abuse with grace. In the end the rendition looks pretty "film-like" to me. The good thing about this process is that it seems to give a lot more control over the tonal distribution than I would have by darkroom printing, or even by using a film scanner. I don't have any objective measure of this, but visually, the DSLR sensor has much more dynamic range than my Nikon film scanner. Some of these negs are pretty thin, and the shadows would have been lost with any sort of conventional darkroom printing or scanning technique. Here I'm able to pull every last iota of detail from the shadows, while still allowing a nice rich black & full contrast image. In some cases I used a Lightroom adjustment then to obscure some of that detail to increase the dramatic effect. I don't think that scanning these negs would preserve that level of shadow detail. In any case, what was meant to be a quick and dirty way to look at some old film proved to be a very useful, fast and flexible way to transfer film to digital.
