Custard Factory, Birmingham, July 22nd
Picked up the Supersonic negs from Gareth today. Scanned and posted 28 shots from the first roll. Set is here. I’m very pleased.
Second roll to follow tomorrow later (the D70 arrived…).
Also picked up my share of the motherlode of film we jointly scored offa ebay. I now have ten rolls of Kodak Tmax p3200 b/w film that expired in 1997 and another 36 rolls of misc, none of which is supposed to be used after 1999. Should be… interesting!
You scanned the negatives?
I was wondering whether I could do this with colour negatives. Do you just use a normal scanner?
I’m using (actually we’re using as I usually have to fight Alex and Andy for it) a Nikon Coolscan 4000 neg/slide scanner which is great but pretty pricey, so we’re very lucky to have it on loan.
I wouldn’t like to say what cheaper options would be like though I’ll have to investigate them eventually I’m sure.
Comparing scanned negs to cheap prints is quite a revelation – there’s no contest really. The only danger is it’s really easy to scratch the negs when loading them into the machine, but this can be argued as part of the charm.
That is a bit pricey. I’ve read that a flatbed scanner can’t be used with colour negs, something to do with an orange layer in the negative. But black and white negs can be scanned successfully on a flatbed, so I’ll be trying that out soon.
If you mean scanning them on the glass as you would a normal document then, yes, it does work with b/w negs but the results are not that great. The thing about negatives is they really should have the light shined through them onto the scanner rather than bounced off (as happens with normal scanning). I assume this is how a dedicated neg scanner works. There’s also the issue of resolution as you’ll be making a massive enlargement of a very small image, assuming you want to make decent quality prints.
You can buy attachments for flatbeds which take slides (and presumably negs) and there are budget scanners around so it’s not like you have to spend hundreds of pounds on a Coolscan.
My problem is the cost of development. But I don’t really want the cost of any scanners or scanner negative attachments either. I’ve been using Boots processing, which might be where I’m going wrong.
As you say scanning B&W negs directly doesn’t give very good results, perhaps I’ll try truprint.co.uk next. They’ll put a film on a CD for £3.78 (£2.39 per film for a batch of 5), and the print quality can’t be worse than Boots, surely?
If you’re not shooting a lot of film (say one a month or so) then the CDs can be a better option than investing in some kit. Pretty much all the dev services offer this these days for under a fiver. As for the high street Snappy Snaps always seem to come recommended for developing.
If you’re in Birmingham (which I think you might be, right?) there’s a handy thread on the Bham Flickr group about getting films developed.
I’m over in Surrey, I have a friend in Birmingham which might be confusing you? I do only shoot about a roll a month, at least, I would do if it was cheaper. I mostly use my digital compact (Ixus 500, not too bad, but not as flexible as the SLR).
Anyway, there are some Snappy Snaps around here so I’ll put them on my list of places to try. Thanks Pete!