digitizing film negatives with a digital camera
I posted about this a bit just now on my federated microblog so I thought I might ramble about it here as well. After Holly got me a very nice half-frame camera, I finally had an impetus to try out camera scanning again. I like my Epson flatbed a lot but for negatives of a certain size, it doesn't quite get the job done. Behold:
From left to right: Epson V600 Photo flatbed film scanner; hacked-together camera digitizing setup using my phone, an unwieldy stack of vintage lenses and adapters, and some popsicle sticks; refined camera digitizing setup using a modern macro lens and calibrated light panel
As you can probably see, there's a pretty big difference between these three scans of the same negative. I happen to like the colors best on the middle one, which is what convinced me to actually invest in proper equipment for camera digitization, but the rightmost one is so much sharper that you can actually see detail in the little seed heads of the grass sticking up in front of the wheel. I'm really excited to use this for scanning my film going forward. Even now I am 3D printing new scanning masks!
It's also a neat exercise in showing just how much color rendition changes between lenses, something which I hadn't been fully convinced of despite knowing it was A Thing. I'm sure the light source also contributed a fair bit. Even accounting for the vagaries of post-processing, the differences are quite striking.
As a bonus, here's a diagram of the barbarian homebrew setup I used to digitize the middle image:
