Time to scan some film
The field by the wood
Yesterday I did something I have not done for 40 years – I developed a roll of film!
Today I scanned it.
A bit of a learning curve to be climbed here, and I made lots of mistakes! Listed a few here to remind myself not to make them again…
Try to keep the shots in order when scanning them. Otherwise when importing into Lightroom they will be in a random order!
Take a few seconds to get the alignment right in the slide scanner saves a lot of time later in the Lightroom crop tool
While you CAN handle monochrome negatives in LightRoom using an inverted curve, NegativeLabPro gives better results more easily – worth the cost I think
Scans using a flatbed scanner with VueScan are no better, and take AGES
Don’t expect modern levels sharpness and contrast from scans of film that is 10 years out of date, taken on a 40-year-old camera by someone that has forgotten how to do manual exposure without a meter, or how to focus accurately on a rangefinder, developed by a novice.
My results are fairly grainy and low contrast, I suspect largely because I didn’t do a great job on the exposure (underexposed, mostly).
But the shots do have a certain character to them… my current thinking is to try to shoot a film every week using a variety of different vintage cameras from my collection.