I first posted this photo of my late friend Adrian ten years ago, but it was already 10 years old then. I’ve not had a look at the rest of the negatives since then. It was scanned with an Olympus ES-10 scanner which I owned for a number of years, by then it was already long in the tooth and struggled to produce a file suitable for printing an A4 print. Fast forward 20 years and I’m experimenting with scanning negatives and slides with a camera and macro lens. It’s early days so far – mainly because you need to hold the film perfectly flat. There are quite a few contraptions on the market that claim to be able to do this, but quite a few of them cost more than a dedicated film scanner which to me negates the whole process entirely. The other factor is converting the negative into a positive. So far I’m just limiting myself to black and white film and am doing the conversion manually in Lightroom. If I decide to move onto colour film then I will have to look at some form of software solution to do this to get good quality results. So anyway here a few photos of Adrian I’ve scanned using my Canon EOS6d and the Canon EF 100mm f2.8 L macro lens.

 

 

 

 

These were tricky to scan – Delta 3200 is pretty grainy, although not as bad as HP5 pushed to 3200 ISO, and developing the film in Rodinal hasn’t helped. But overall I’m happy with the result so far. They are certainly better than that original scan and are better than those I used to produce with my CanoScan 9900f flatbed scanner.