The luxury of scanned sprocket holes

December 29, 2018 Filippo Nenna

I don’t use a flatbed scanner to scan film negatives. I use a digital camera and a light box (you can read more about that in my post on developing and scanning). One big feature of this method is that I preserve the frame of the negatives, including the sprocket holes on 35mm film. With a regular scanner, the film holder masks most of the image borders to hold the negative. Having a scan of the full extent of the film both looks cool and has the extra function of recording the frame numbers so you can reference scans to the original negatives at a glance.

I thought nothing of this benefit until I read a passage written by Eric Meola in his book on shooting Springsteen’s Born to Run album cover. For this 2006 book, he says he had to borrow a $50,000 scanner from Kodak and use an oil immersion holder to minimize dust and scratches on the negatives. We have it easy in 2018 - great quality scanning no longer requires you to remortgage your house.

I offer local black and white film developing, along with scanning, and first-time clients love seeing the full frame of each image. It adds some credibility to the ‘realness’ of your film shots when the film frame says ‘Kodak’ or ‘Ilford’ instead of ‘Unfold’. It shows that your work was recording light rather than 0s and 1s.

This Eric Meola book is a fantastic insight into how the album cover was shot, and just like the Magnum contact sheets book, shows the process of working the scene and all the rejected images.

And here is a fun fact for those thinking digital photography was the birth of ‘spray and pray’ - Meola shot 700 frames in 2 hours on 35mm film in 1975. His winding thumb must have been on fire!

Houston museum of fine arts film negative ilford hp5

If you are struggling to load your MOD 54, read this

May 21, 2018 Filippo Nenna

At this very moment you have your hands deep in a dark bag trying to load your 4x5 negatives. You've called a nearby family member to Google 'load a mod 54' for you because you've forgotten the details of what it looks like and things aren't going well.

Don't panic. It is going to be alright.

First things first - locate the ridges at the top of the MOD 54. The ridges on the negatives must be on the same side on the top left (note that this is different from the location of the ridges when placing them in a film holder, which is top right in that case).
Get your first sheet of film in your hands. Bend it along its length and place it to the very bottom of the stack before releasing the bend. Check with your fingertips that the film isn't held up in one of the upper notches.
Your breathing should be easier now and your heart rate lower. We are going to make it.
The easiest notch to locate is the upper one, so here is the secret tip - load the second sheet into the upper notch. "That's crazy!" you say - but keep your trousers and/or pants on. From here you can carefully move the film down to the middle notch one side at a time. You know you've done a good job when you feel the sides of two sheets of film are parallel.
The third sheet of film goes into the easy upper notch and can be left there. Again, check the sides of the sheets are parallel. If they are not, work backwards until you find the offending sheet/notch combination.
Repeat these steps for the three sheets on the other side of the Mod 54.

Hopefully you got this done before the combination of stress and time made your arms perspire streams of frustration in the dark bag.

Minimalist darkroom: An enlarger using a 4x5 camera

April 23, 2018 Filippo Nenna

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The creator of the Intrepid 4x5 camera announced he was working on an attachment to use the camera as an enlarger. What a brilliant idea.

I'll be the first to sign up when the enlarger is released - but in the mean time I wanted to see if I could make my own contraption and get printing right away. Here's how I did it...

The enlarging attachment

The idea is simple - use a LED light source (large, even illumination and low heat production) to shine through a negative in the film holder location on the camera. I designed an adapter out of layered thin plywood to hold a DIY foam negative holder on one side, with a multigrade filter and the LED source on the other. The entire thing is encased in a lid, using black silicone caulk to make it light-tight and painted it all black. This all sits on the back of a 4x5 camera and can be height-adjusted on a tripod (in this case, a 3 legged thing Albert). The Intrepid version looks like it will use the graflok system to securely attach the box to the camera. My version is loose, so there is a danger of it being knocked off.

Film formats

The foam negative holder is removable so it can be swapped out with another to mask different sized film. Different lenses are required for different film formats, too. They should be close the normal focal length associated with that format: I use a 65mm for 35mm film (the shortest focal length my camera can handle), a 90mm for medium format and a 150mm for 4x5 large format negatives.

Additional enlarging equipment

Rather than get an enlarger timer, I took Ansel's advice to use a simple metronome. I use a Seiko DM110 which has red indicator lights. The enlarger LED has a physical on-off switch so it can be left in the 'on' position and activated remotely with a simple foot switch.

The only other equipment needed are 4 trays for chemicals and water, tongs, paper easels and a safe-light (I use a junior bulb in a light-stand socket). The final critical item is a black-out screen for my bathroom window. I made it using layers of cardboard to act as a light-trap when inserted into the window frame.

All of this darkroom kit (bar the cardboard screen and the camera/tripod) can fit into a 32 quart storage container. Most of the chemicals used are part of my negative-developing kit. The only difference is the use of Ilford's multigrade developer for the prints.

This is a darkroom in a bucket. The world's most compact darkroom? It would be tough to beat this setup.

Using the minimalist darkroom

The first test of the darkroom was a success. I expected the LED was lower powered than a regular enlarger bulb, leading to very long exposure times, but in reality I was getting correctly exposed prints in the ballpark of 16 seconds at f22.

The main disadvantage was that the enlarger casing had to be removed to change the negative or the filter, whereas these items would be quickly switched out on a traditional enlarger. I also found that the honeycomb pattern of the LEDs was noticeable on the projection - this was addressed by placing a sheet of tracing paper behind the filter to act as a diffuser.

While not as convenient as a permanent darkroom, this compact setup might be what you are looking for if you have limited space.

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Post processing a scanned negative

January 17, 2018 Filippo Nenna

Houston Police Memoral. Hasselblad 500cm, Ilford HP5.

Playing with film is easy - take pictures, develop the film, make scans and process them digitally. This hybrid method means you don't need a darkroom or an enlarger until you want to go all-in. I have a simple overview of the entire workflow available here.

In this post, I'll elaborate on how I treat black and white images after they are scanned.

Post-scanning workflow

Once a set of black and white negatives is developed and scanned, the digital files can be processed like any other digital image. My scanning is done with a tethered DSLR on a tripod over a light table. Here are the processing steps I usually take:

Importing

I import the images from the tethered image folder (move rather than copy) with a preset that inverts them into positives and decreases saturation to zero. The preset also adds metadata tags including film type and camera type.
- For the inversion I use curves - it is the only way to do it as there is no 'invert image' function like with Photoshop. Move the left-hand node from the bottom to the top, and the right-hand node from the top to the bottom (see the screengrabs below).

Processing

Update May 2022: I have a youtube video covering a lot of this information in detail

Because each frame is scanned in the exact same location on the light-table, I can use a 'sync' in the Develop module to crop all the images at once. I usually leave the film border on the image and crop it out of those I intend to print.
- Why leave on the film borders? Because they have frame numbers in case they are needed in the future to match with the physical negatives. They are a visual aid to determining which images are truly film vs digital black and white when scanning through Lightroom. They often look great when left as original borders on an image.
If no import preset was used, invert the image with the curves, and decrease saturation to zero.
For each image, I shift the exposure to centralize the tones on the histogram.
Black and white points are adjusted, usually to the extremes. The frame border should really be pure black and the text (like Ilford HP5, or Kodak TriX, or a frame number) should be pure white. This is a good starting point, but adjust for the photograph.
If the black point still doesn't clip (remember this is altered by the 'whites' slider after the inversion), I'll use the curves to clip them slightly. This generally takes the image from foggy to clear.
Luminance can help with a grainy picture, depending on what is desired.
Some post-crop vignette can help divert attention from the edges of an image.

Exporting

I export using a custom export preset: The files are resized to 1250 pixels on the long edge at 150 dpi and 77% quality for a Jpeg.

Film Scan On Import

Film Scan After Processing

Presets

Presets are essentially a one-click macro that automatically applies a series of tweaks all at once. Other than the ones I use on import/export, general developing presets can be tricky to use if they were developed for regular digital images. I’ve found that if any presets used the tone curve, they reset the image back into a negative. Another side effect is that any colour corrections are inverted, too. So any sun or warming brushes turn into cold blue tones on my inverted negatives.

It seems there is a gap in the market for those using Lightroom presets for images originating on negative film. If there is the demand, I can make my simple import and export presets available.

Lightroom pitfalls

Lightroom has no 'invert image' function. The inversion must be achieved with curves.
A number of sliders are reversed once the negative is made positive with curves. Exposure is back to front, as are the blacks and whites sliders.
I still haven't figured out how to deal with the highlight and shadow sliders on an inverted image. They can be unpredictable, especially the highlights.
The adjustment brush auto-mask function doesn't seem to work well with my images - maybe because of the grain, or because they have been inverted. Auto-mask usually works fine on my conventional digital images.
Because I leave the film borders on each image, it can confuse the auto-transform function when trying to correct for perspective. I have to rely on manual corections.
The negative origin of the image seems to confuse the spot heal tool, too. It seems to pick sample areas that are not at all similar to the heal area.
Lightroom won't do face recognition on an image inverted from a negative.

Using negatives as a final image

January 8, 2018 Filippo Nenna

When scanning black and white negatives, the moment when the negative image is inverted into a positive is captivating. No matter how much I study the negatives, they always seem blurry and difficult to interpret. The positives suddenly seem sharp and the scene presents itself clearly.

But sometimes a negative stands out on its own. It seems ethereal, or occasionally more real than when converted to positive. Some subjects work better than others - a human face often looks demonic in negative form as the eyes turn black with white pupils. But natural scenes and architecture seems to have their own charm as negatives.

Stalk Houston Buffalo Bayou negative

Stalk Houston Buffalo Bayou positive

As most photographs are subjected to some sort of post-production (whether in the darkroom or Lightroom), it seems that a conscious decision to not invert the negative is also a creative possibility.

Hybrid film processing (no darkroom needed)

September 21, 2017 Filippo Nenna

Most people don't try film photography because they fear film processing lab costs or think they need a full-on darkroom to get the job done. I shoot black and white film which is easily developed at home for very little cost and without a dark room, but it takes a little time (the money-time compromise). I scan the images so they can be manipulated digitally and printed. I'll describe the entire process here.

NOTE: If you are in Houston and looking for overnight developing and scanning of your black and white film, you might be interested in my developing service.

Film

I use purchased 120 rolls for medium format and sheet film for 4x5. I use bulk film for 35mm and load it into reusable canisters using a Lloyd daylight loader. Getting film from its box to the loader requires a dark-bag.

developing the Negatives

This can be done in a kitchen or bathroom using a dark-bag. The only time darkness is required is getting the film from the roll/film holder into a light-tight developing tank. This even works for 4x5 sheets using the 'mod54' insert.

Four liquids are used in specific dilutions: developer, stop-bath, fixer and a rinsing agent. They are mixed in plastic measuring jugs and brought down or up to temperature in a water bath (kitchen sink) using a thermometer. The stop-bath and fixer can be reused to save on cost and waste.

Developing times and temperatures are determined based on the developer and film combinations used. See the massive development chart for suggestions. I use my smartphone as a developing timer.

After rinsing, film needs to be hanged to dry (i use wooden clothes pegs) and they are cut to length with a film cutter to fit into dedicated plastic binder sleeves.

Scanning

Using a 6D Mark ii and a lightbox to scan 35mm film

Darkroom printing requires a lot of extra equipment and a dark room. As much as I'd like to do this for fun someday, I currently use a hybrid method of shooting and developing film, but then scanning it and processing on a computer. A dedicated scanner can be used, but as I already have a digital camera, tripod and a macro lens, I simply place my film on a light box and take digital pictures of each frame. To make this process easier, I use the Canon's tethering software to use live view and remote shooting through my laptop. The images are high resolution RAW captures, and the resolution can be increased by stitching multiple images of different parts of the same negative.

Digital manipulation

Negative images can be inverted to positives using Lightroom or Photoshop (but not Adobe Camera Raw, the Photoshop Elements Organizer or Canon Digital Photo Professional, annoyingly).

A note on inverting photographs: I used to use Photoshop Elements for this task, but that means opening each image separately, inverting to a positive image, and saving the file (fortunately, saving can be done as a batch process). I have since started using Lightroom, and created a preset to invert a set of images automatically. This saves so much time it might be worth getting Lightroom for this reason alone.

With this hybrid approach, many digital techniques are now available: HDR, panoramas, spot/dust removal,dodging and burning, smoothing and sharpening, colour mapping, the list goes on.

The digital scans are effectively a backup of the physical negatives, which are stored in a folder and can be re-scanned with future technology at any time.

An image doesn't exist until it is printed, and I can easily send my scans to a print service or create a photo book.

In conclusion

There's a lot to think about when using film and developing at home, but it is not all that difficult and the process itself is part of the attraction of film photography.

Want to find out more? Here's another great resource on film photography to read on Pixpa.