More and more photographers are attempting to build their own DIY lightboxes these days as they look for ways to easily digitize their film at home using a digital camera. However, a common problem that plagues these lightboxes is vignetting — lighting is uneven and shadows form gradients near the edges of the surface.

Photographer Rafał Nitychoruk of Gdynia, Poland tells us that he has solved the problem with his own custom lightbox. The trick? Make your lightbox short, and stack multiple layers of glass.
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Photographer and software developer Kostas Rutkauskas has launched a new mobile app called Helmut. Designed for Android, it’s a film scanning app that lets you digitize your old film strips quickly and on the cheap.
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My name is David Lo, and I am a street photographer who enjoys taking vintage cameras, digitizing them, and then using them for street photography. This is a walkthrough on my process of modifying a camera.
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With the cost of my local neg scanner in London being £40/hour for a Hasselblad Flextight, I have been digitising using a DSLR for a quite a while. The results can be extremely good as long as a little time is put into the setup to begin with.
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Yesterday I wrote a post showing the high level of image quality you can achieve by scanning film using a digital camera rather than a film scanner. This post will describe my personal technique for digitizing film using a DSLR and a macro lens.
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If you shoot film and aren’t much into chemicals (or don’t have a basement in which to keep a gigantic 5×7″ enlarger), you’ll soon find yourself needing a way to import those beautiful pictures you’ve taken onto your computer. What? Why didn’t I say, “you’ll need a scanner”? After all, it’s not 1987 anymore — scanners are as common as toaster ovens.

Well, I didn’t say “a scanner” because it’s not the only way you can digitalize those pictures. Indeed, even though it’s the first (and often only) technique most people will think of, it is also the most inefficient and time consuming. And it can lose a lot, I mean a lot, of the quality of the original slide or negative.
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The iPICS2GO Negative to iPhone Scanner is a simple device that lets your iPhone double as a scanner for photos, both film and prints. It works with 35mm negatives and slide film, as well as 3×5 and 4×6 prints.

Just plug your iPhone 4 or iPhone 4S into the top, fire up the powerful editing app and feed a photo, slide or negative into the PICS2GO. With the app’s easy-to-use controls you can scan your pics in seconds, and save them as a digital file that’ll last forever. Or at least until the next technological revolution.

Battery-powered and designed purely for the iPhone 4 and 4S, the iPICS2GO is a handy little gadget that you can use anywhere in the house. Scan your family album while you’re watching the telly; or take it round your Nan’s house and go through her black and white snaps. There’s never been an easier or more convenient way to save your precious, perishable photo prints.

The scan quality is, well, iPhone camera quality, but it’s a pretty cheap option considering the $63 price tag.

iPICS2GO Negative to iPhone Scanner (via Gizmodo)

There’s an abandoned McDonalds in California that’s stuffed with 48,000 pounds of 70mm tape. These tapes contain never-before-seen ultra-high-res photographs of the moon shot by the Lunar Orbiter project 40 years ago. Rather than ship the film back to Earth, scientists decided to scan them on the spaceship, beam them back losslessly, and then record the data onto magnetic tape. Not wanting to reveal the precision of its spy satellites, the US government decided to mark the images as classified.
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Well, lets just say I’ve gotten better at this over the last couple of years. The left image was one of the first I’ve “scanned” with my DSLR, and the one on the right I’ve just rescanned using the techniques described below (higher resolution available here). Right now I can get higher resolution and better image quality that what street labs give you on CD.
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Shoebox is an app by 1000 Memories that lets you turn your iOS or Android smartphone into a scanner for digitizing old paper photos (the photos don’t have to be old, of course). The app goes far beyond manual snapping and cropping: it uses edge detection to help you crop, color balance to compensate for lighting, and auto-flattens the resulting image to adjust for your camera’s tilt. You can download it for free through the iTunes App Store or Google Play.

Shoebox [1000 Memories]