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Re: Photographing old negatives / workflow
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PLShutterbug wrote:
Moderator: Let me know where this belongs if not here. I looked but couldn’t find a topic area that seemed a better fit.
I have something like 4,000 old negatives and slides to digitize in formats from 126 Instamatic to 2-1/2”x4-1/4”. I plan to photograph these using my Z7, Nikkor 60mm Micro, and a negative stage I built myself. I’m not interested in using a scanner for this.
Best practices? My current plan:
- Create custom picture controls for each emulsion type so I can see positives in camera before I even fire the shutter. That way I can just not photograph ones that don’t look interesting.
- I use Affinity for editing so plan to shoot RAW, save to disk and then use View-NXi to bulk convert to TIFF before tweaking those I’m interested in. That way I don’t have to re-process the RAW files again in Affinity.
- I’d like to connect my camera to PC to preview and maybe save direct to disk. Looks like Nikon Camera Control Pro 2 for this but wonder if it provides the flexibility I know I will want. In particular:
- - If I know an image should be vertical, I’d like to indicate that so the original is flagged that way.
- - Auto dust and scratch healing?
Has anyone here done this, and have advice?
Thanks.
Yes, I have done this, not with my Z7, but with my D810 because the autofocus does not work on the Z7 with my 60mm Macro.
I wanted to start digitizing my old jazz and performing arts archive.
I have also reproduced the stuff I took on my first continentale trips back when I was in my 20's.
With the jazz archive, I started by reproducing what I had printed back in the day, but I found it was quicker just to photograph whole concerts leaving out the stuff that was obviously not worth reproducing. I could then look with more calm at what was worth processing. I found an awful lot of things I had missed the first time around, so it is worth reproducing as much as you can.
It is interesting, that what I wanted and, what I thought were good shots has changed with time and maturity. Things I dismissed back, then were not the failures I thought them to be.
My reproduction rig is a custom made aluminium base holding a neg ot transparency holder form my old enlarger. For negatives the process of copying is very fast as the negatives slide through the film holder.
I processed in DXO doing a batch BW negative profile. I removed dust with a blower as I did in the darkroom and the spotting out was done in post with healing.
I have found that with modern software I can drag a lot of stuff out of those negatives that was almost impossible in the darkroom.
Here is an Ebook I made of my Jazz shots.
Joe Henderson
Pat Metheny
A- ha
Ian Anderson