20 Square Inches Of Trouble - Sheet Film

No apologies for the inches, children. It is what the adults use to measure photographic surfaces.

Even if we do give in to buying inkjet paper in A4, A3 and A2 sizes, we still get boxes of 6 x 4 and 5 x 7 from Ilford. And we measure print sizes in 8 x 10, 11 x 14, 10, 12, and 20 x 24 as well - it must put the wind up to the bureaucrats in the EU standards Department something chronic.

We also measure one of the standard sizes in the industry for sheet film as 4 x 5 inches. Europeans tried for years to make this into 10 x 12 centimetres but it never really took off - people still think of 5 x 4 or 4 x 5. 20 square inches of sensitive emulsion to put into the new Ilford Obscure pinhole camera - for good or ill. There is a 10-sheet box of it included with the kit - Ilford Delta 100 - a tabular grain film of excellent tonality.

Note: you can also get Ilford HP 5 and Ilford Delta 400 film in 4 x 5 packs from the regular fridges at the Camera Electronic shops. They are the larger 25-sheet boxes.

The convention of sheet film is familiar to all the old hands - but newbies to large format need to remember that the sensitive emulsion side of the film is TOWARD you when you can feel the film notches on the right hand top corner of the film. You will feel, rather than see them as you will be in total darkness for this loading and unloading procedure.

In the case of the Obscura, as soon as you are sure it really is entirely dark, open the box, locate that upper right notched corner, and lay the sheet into the large of he two boxes. Then drop the smaller box into it and press until the magnets catch. You are loaded for ( extremely slow ) bears. Unloading is the reverse of the procedure, and you can make use of the three-tray spare film box that came in the kit to hold your exposed film for processing later.

Now 4 " x 5 " is a little bit larger than the sensor on the average digital camera or mobile phone....and records a geat deal of information. The pinhole of the Obscura may be laying in a slightly soft image, but it will be laying a lot of it in there. If you were to make a contact print of the resultant negative - provided it was a good exposure - you would be amazed at the amount of detail that has been captured. If it is a bad exposure, you will be struggling to see anything.

The best hint I can give with the end result is for people who have good scanners like the Epson V700 or 800 series. You'll have a sheet film holder in your standard Epson kit and can easily translate a negative to a digital file. I do it all the time using the " Home " setting in the software. There is plenty of detail captured from the sheet negative.

Users of sheet film who develop their films with traditional developers like Rodinal have sometimes bemoaned the grain structure that it produces. Scanned work in small sizes exhibits none of this problem and the contrast of the grain is excellent. Remember that you can also use Kodak Portra sheet film for colour work and have it developed at a professional lab.

The Can Of Air - Falcon To The Rescue

For years we have sold the Dust-Off brand of canned air made by Falcon. These are the familiar blue and white aerosol cans with the black tops and the red extension tubes that are racked up in the ink,  paper, and chemistry section at the back of the shop.

I guess they aren't actually aerosols - they are compressed air in there. The cans have traditionally cost $ 25 and last for ages in most applications. Good steady seller.

Originally the only use for them I conceived was in printing negatives in an enlarger. The Dust Off can was used to spray over the top surface and under surface of the negative in the holder to blow away dust.

The enlarger has been gone for years but the Dust Off remains - because I have found a raft of new photographic uses for it:

a. Spray the dust off the platen of the Epson V700 scanner. It's a large glass surface and attracts gunk via static electricity. I wipe it with an anti-stat cloth and then the Dust Off and it is pristine.
 The negs and slide also get the spray treatment.

b. It is ideal for blasting dust and grit from the OUTSIDE of cameras prior to changing lenses. Don't use it on the interior mirror or sensor area.

c. Clean the swarf out of the battery compartments on the flash units.

d. Likewise fire the dirt out of the recesses of the Epson R3000 printer. One good trick as well is to keep the R3000 swaddled in the plastic cover it came with in the delivery box. Looks naff but keeps the thing cleaner.

e. When the computer gets dusty inside and runs hot you can blow a blast of air through to to give the cooling fins and fans some help. The Dust Off bottle becomes cold by the expansion of the gas and then you can hold it against the hot section of the outer case of the computer for quick thermal relief.

f. Dust that lens off.

g. Make frothy coffee at the computer desk.

Plus it looks like something out of Game Of Thrones...

The Transparent Work-Round - Part One - All Uphill

We are always being given ways of working-round things on computers.

Some times what we are working around is an old computer - sometimes an old program. Sometimes

it is money - we find that cutting our coats to suit our cloth means we are wearing Barbie-sized coats...

In the case of this dodge, it is not because I do not own other equipment - it is a case of the time required to let that other equipment do its thing. I've stopwatched the process I am undertaking and I can cut the time required in half.

The project is the digitizing and rehousing of colour transparencies - mostly 35mm slides from the last 50 years. It isn't like I am doing Time - Life's collection - I counted only 7800 transparencies - but the time needed to clean them, scan them, correct the colours, and write their information into a JPEG file is going to be significant.

Don't get me wrong about the Epson V700 - V850's. They are fantastic scanners that translate older works from print, transparency, negative, or book very well indeed. There is no other really good economical answer for good scans from 4 x 5 sheet film. For that alone, it is worth the money. It also has templates and holders to scan mounted 35mm slides in batches of 12 on a pretty automatic basis. The problem is the amount of time it takes to do so for each image; counting loading, scanning, unloading, and sorting, you spend 3.5 minutes per slide. That is without noticeable correction time. A great portion of that time is taken up with the scanner doing a preview, then having to specify what size you want the output, then doing the actual scan.

7800 slides x 3.5 minutes =  455 hours...or roughly the time it takes to get a teenager to clean up their room. To be fair to the Epson, there is an automatic colour restoration circuit that can really revitalise some of the faded transparencies.

Well, there had to be a better way. The key to it was the collection of gear that was lying unused in the cupboard - specifically a Tokina 30mm macro lens on an adapter and a very old Novoflex focusing track. That and a Metrolux light box left over from surgery days and a cut off bit of Bunnings 12mm MDF board.

Remember the old days of the Bowens and Illumitran slide duplicators? Those wonderful boxes that let you put colour corrected light behind a transparency and then held a lens, bellows, and 35mm camera body above it so that you could re-photograph the slide? They were great - why, I'll bet that are a few lurking around the old storage shelves of Camera Electronic still...

Well, I could make up an MDF stand with a cutout the size of a 35mm slide, mount my Fujifilm X-T10 camera and the Tokina lens above it, and adjust the assembly up and down until the image exactly filled the screen of the Fujifilm. A macro lens that focuses close enough to do 1:1 is what I needed, though due to the nature of the APS-C sensor it did not go out to full 1:1 - I stopped in focus at 1:1.25.

The second part of this posting - tomorrow, I hope - will take you further into the settings and experiments to get good reproduction. In the meantime  think about whether you would like to do the same - Camera Electronic has some goodies that might help you to do the trick.

New Epson Scanner Hits The Floor

Actually that should read " was placed carefully on the floor in anticipation of a sale...".

The new V800 scanners from Epson have arrived this week. They are like the old Epson V700 with a hundred more...Actually they are a dead ringer for the V700 in shelf footprint and ease of connectivity but they have several improvements:

1. New LED light source within the scanner. Epson mention that it is cooler, brighter, longer lived, and uses less power than the light on the V700 and V750. Also that there is no more warm-up time to sit through - the new scanner starts within two seconds.

2. Dual lens automatically selected with the source medium.

3. New film and slide trays that are more secure and provide a flatter hold on the films.

4. Optional fluid-mount tray for B&W images.

5. Silverfast SE8 editing program on a disc is included in the box.

6. The same 6400 dpi and D-Max 4.0 performance.

These class of scanner have always been noted for ease of use and speed of operation. I use a V700 regularly and depend on it to add images from my film archives. Boy, does it ever point out to me how rotten I was at processing in the 1970's...I seem to have been able to make every mistake in the book. But I can spot like crazy with the Photoshop Elements program so eventually all is well.

Scanning The Easy Way with Epson V700

I sat last night scanning 4 x 5 negatives from my old studio film production period. It was a trip down Memory Lane - chiefly in the ruts. I realised how stilted some of my shots had become. I am glad  decided to dispose of time-expired props every 6 months - those stilts took up a lot of room. And you always seemed to see up everyone's nose...

Using the Epson reminded me how well it had been designed -  and how streamlined they had made the operation. You clap the negatives into a holder, drop it onto the scanner, close the lid. Press preview on the computer screen and see what the result is going to look like. You can pre-crop the pictures, or rotate them, or restore dodgy colour. Then you press "scan" and pick up your cup of coffee. the Epson throws the files into wherever you nominate and you are on to the next lot.

When I scan the old 35mm colour slides, I can slot 12 of them into the scanner plate at a time - no removing them from the mounts. Then just do as before.

The reason this posting has come up is an enquiry from someone who wanted to adapt a large DSLR and a large macro lens to rephotograph colour slides...with the attendant complication of excluding external light and holding the slide parallel to the sensor and getting an even illumination and a correct colour balance...

Do-able, but then so is ice skating in Namibia. That's where the Toronto Maple Leafs learned their hockey skills...*

I do urge people who want the best quality result for the least effort to think about the Epson V-series scanners. They also open the door to recording prints, albums, and written material in an efficient manner with equal facility.

* Ouch, eh...?

35MM Scanners Back In Stock

Good news for people who have a vast collection of 35mm negatives and slides - and wish they were in digital files.

We've got the Plustek OpticFilm 8100 scanners back in stock.

These are dedicated scanners for 35mm film. You get 7200 dpi resolution, high dynamic range, dust removal software, and colour restoration capability. Interestingly, you can also deal with over-saturation in older slides. Those people who used Ferrania and Anscochrome might find this useful, but in my experience most older slides lose colour rather than gain it.

The scanner will preview slides in 8 seconds - it takes longer for a working scan and you can go over your material several times to get a greater dynamic range.

Apparently it also has a quick-start feature that eliminates time required for warm-up.

Best of all is the price - $ 425. You can make your money back doing your own digitising.

Engage Automatic Warp Drive One, Mr Sulu...With Epson

Good news for those of you who have been following my experiments in the Scientific Ruritanian - the anti-gravity ray is finally working. Once I get the dog down off the ceiling I will be able to publish the final paper. Until then it may be as well to avoid walking under him...

On another front, I finally got to try one of the features of the Epson V700 scanner this weekend, and can report on the operation.

The V700 is a flat-bed scanner that has been specifically designed to accommodate transparent and solid copy from the tiniest miniature format to the 8 x 10 size. I have owned on for 5 years and have used it extensively to mine the archives of my negative and slide collection. I scan and save the images into the digital bag and then use the Adobe Photoshop Elements program to modify them.

In many case the modification is confined to cleaning the spots and dust from the scan. My negatives and slides have been stored in proper sleeves for the last 40 years but even the best storage is a little subject to contamination. Indeed, the act of taking an old negative out of storage and placing it in the dedicated scanner plates can attract some dust through static electricity. The newest negs have little to bother them, and the big sheet film negs are so big as to render small dust unexceptionable, but the 35mm and 120 ones from the 90's generally need some spotting.

Of course spotting these days is mouse or stylus-based using the spot feature of PSE10 and is very effective - you cannot see where the program has erased the problem. But it all takes time as you navigate around the image at 100% and zap the spots. Then you go out to page size and invariably you have missed one, so you zoom in again...

The Epson V700 has a feature that is designed to relieve this problem. There is an ICE circuit built into the control panel that supposedly removes the dust automatically. I tried it last night with the experiment of doing one scan on a moderately clean image and then spotting it manually - timing myself - and then repeated the scan on the same image with the ICE turned on.

At this juncture let me explain what I think the ICE is doing - if I am right it is science and if I am wrong it is sorcery. It makes a regular preview scan as pre normal - you inspect it and choos the size and crop. When you engage the ICE and tell it to scan it goes down your image once, then resets itself - with an audible click that is distinct to the ICE setting - and runs slowly down the image again. I suspect that it is looking at the surface of the film from a slightly different scan bar angle - hence the click - and then supplying the computer with two images to compare. the computer takes some time to do this before it spits the final image to wherever you have requested.

The time taken to do this is at least double that of the un-cleaned scan, and in some cases it may be more than double. But we are not talking about very long scans here, either. In any case in the end you have an image that is entirely free of dust - and here is the good part: I inspected the manual clean version and the auto clean version side by side and cannot see any loss of resolution. Just loss of dust.

The time taken to do the ICE clean is no longer - and in the case of a heavily contaminated surface can be much shorter - than the business of doing it yourself and then spotting away for 5 minutes.

Tonight I shall make the experiment of deliberately putting a fingerprint on the non-emulsion side of a negative and see if the mechanism can cope with the whorls and spots. I also have several negatives of shame that never received proper washing and have chemical contamination on the surface - it will be interesting to see what it makes of them.