
Rediscovering Sarah Stup and 35mm Film
Sarah Stup is an award-winning autism advocate and author who is working on her latest book, tentatively titled "My Autism, My Journal."
Sarah Stup is an award-winning autism advocate and author who is working on her latest book, tentatively titled "My Autism, My Journal."
Cameradactyl camera maker Ethan Moses has announced the new Cameradactyl Mongoose, an automatic 35mm film carrier for people who want to quickly scan their film using a digital camera.
Since I first started camera scanning, I've always advocated using the highest resolution camera you can get ahold of. (My first camera scans were with the 1.3-megapixel Nikon E2n, so it's been a long road.) That advice is changing.
Film photographer and blogger Hamish Gill wanted a cheap and simple way to scan 5x4 large-format film. After searching and failing to find a suitable diffuser holder for his film, Gill decided to create his own, and that's how the idea for the pixl-latr was born.
Shooting film is fun and developing film is fun, but tediously scanning film is not fun... so I built myself a film-digitizing light box to be used with a flash and a 1:1 macro lens.
Software developer Abe Fettig has a winner on his hands. His newly developed app FilmLab makes it easier than ever to turn film negatives and slides of various sizes into digital files without having to touch a scanner, understand wet mounting, or really do anymore more than point and shoot with your smartphone.
Often when scoping out digitization projects, devising complementary conservation treatments that assist in digital photo capture are challenging aspects of overall workflow design. And so it has been the case with our recent efforts at UConn Library on a set of 19th century Latin American newspapers from the University's archives and special collections.
One of the challenges (and rewards) of managing a digital production lab for a university research library is working with the wide assortment of analog formats that are collected within its archives, special collections, and map library holdings. For instance, we've recently begun conversion work on a 2002 aerial survey of Connecticut that was originally shot on 9"x9" positive black and white film.
Photographers are always telling each other to print their photos, but at the same time, services keep springing up that let you do the exact opposite: digitize your prints. Photomyne is one of these services, a feature-rich smartphone app that lets you turn your old prints into digital files faster than anything else out there.
Photographer Cecil Williams of Orangeburg, South Carolina, wanted a faster way to digitize 2,000 of his negatives, so he invented a new system called the FilmToaster. It's a $1,699 box that lets you digitize most popular film formats using your digital camera.
Photographer Levi Bettweiser and his Rescued Film …
Want to scan some film but don't have a scanner handy? You can actually do some high quality digitization using some LEGO blocks, a smartphone or tablet, and a camera with decent resolution. Filmmaker Zachary Antell uses a method using those components, and his results are pretty impressive.
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.
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.