My film negative 'scanner' set-up
Even though I have two digital backs for my Rollei's, I still shoot a lot of film. Film is great fun, and still has some qualities in look, color and feel that can be hard to get with digital. IMHO - The biggest downside to film is getting it scanned. I use my Rollei 6008AF and CF 528 digital back (multishot) to 'scan' my negatives. In the picture from my cell phone, you can see a quick snap shot of my set-up. I have the 6008AF on a copy stand with a light table under it. Mine is a Kaiser eVision that has the light table built in. Obviously you could use any camera and light source, but its important to use a flicker free light or one that has a high frequency ballast so you don't get dull spots in part of the frame. Typically I set my lens aperture to about f/11. This gives me sufficient DOF (mostly for focusing errors but also in case the film bends under the heat of the light) but avoids diffraction losses of smaller apertures. I used to use a bowen's illumitran slide copier for this purpose. It has a built in flash under neath and a focusing light. The flash makes for much shorter exposures and probably has higher CRI too. I guess I'm just too lazy to set it up every time. I use an enlarger negative holder to hold the film strips in place under the camera so I don't have to waste time getting them into place. I just slide the film through frame by frame. I have a Schneider enlarging lens fitted to the Rollei M39/M40 shutter adapter but sometimes just use the Rollei 90mm apo makro lens with extension tubes. In the picture, I am have set this up to scan color film (Portra 400) which has a orange carrier. The orange makes it hard to adjust color wise so I have made myself a blue filter to neutralize the carrier. I did this by shooting the orange carrier, sampling the color and making a solid layer of that color and inverting it in photoshop. I printed this blue onto a clear transparency film. Sounds hard but was very simple. I use a filter called color perfect to handle the color 'scans' after that. I can 'scan' several rolls of film in about 30 minutes this way. I think traditional scanning would be many times longer at least at the resolution I get.
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