Film scanning and digital workflow

Hello film shooters!  I was reading a friend’s blog post recently and he was complaining that he wasn’t wowed by the images he was getting straight out of the scanner.  Well, that’s the way it’s supposed to be!  Actually with my scanner I go through extra steps to not be “wowed” by the images straight out of the scanner, and I probably should do more, at some point.  From what I remember the regular PSI software for the Pakon scanners outputs at 8Bit (even TIFFs) though my Pakon F335 is capable of 12Bit or 14Bit I believe; this takes special software which I have never bothered to set up.

I’m not sure how everyone else scans their film, but I decided to write this to show how I do it.  Of course a lot of the time the lab is doing it for me, and while I wouldn’t complain too much about how they do it, if you have the ability to scan yourself then there is greater control over your images and it costs less.  I had my Pakon  scanner out of storage for a few months while I was living in a place where there was room for it, so I had my local lab develop my film and return the negatives to me uncut, which was less work for them and easier for me to scan.

The standard way of scanning with PSI tends to render black & white film with far too much contrast, so I manually select everything and lower the contrast to at least -20, possibly -40 depending on the film (-40 is as flat as it gets).  In the past I exported raw negative images but found that my inversions were losing quite a bit of the image; it’s an extemporaneous step, plus you’re losing all the benefits of working with PSI and Kodak’s experience that was brought to the color science of getting proper scans.  If you own a Pakon F135 (non-plus) you’re using TLX Client Demo and the only way you can get the full 3000×2000 resolution is to output raw, I hear.  But I also hear plugins like Negative Lab Pro work amazingly well.

Now probably the most annoying thing about working with the Pakon is that it was designed to only be used with Windows XP machines (I have a couple) and while that was a damn good OS and I miss it, sadly I can’t just plug my scanner into any computer, I have to have a dedicated scanning machine and then export everything onto a flash drive (formatted for Fat32) and brought over to my laptop for finishing. I have everything saved by roll and drag all 38 or so files into Affinity Photo to start working on them:

This is how a scan will look before I start to work on it:

For some reason the Pakon’s black & white scans still have some color and have to be turned grayscale, so I do that and then adjust the curves to where I need them.  This image was exposed perfectly and required very little adjustment, not always the case.

Even shooting my modified Sunny-8 rule with a non-metered manual camera I’ve gotten pretty good at reading the light so I fluff very little…outdoors.  Indoors is another story, much more guesswork there.  PSI file names by default start with AA, AB, AC, etc, so I add my own prefix which tells me the year and season I shot them as well as where this roll fits in sequentially.  So I have everything saved by roll of film in the full res JPGs, but I do a little more work to get things ready for the internet, starting with making all the images smaller.

I still use a watermark though I’m getting away from that, for right now making it much less obtrusive.  Final export includes a bit more compression to keep the file size down.

And here is the final image:

Can’t resist taking photos with beautiful women!

Family is important

Back in October/November 2021 I was going through my old posts looking at all the different photos I’d taken and deciding which ones I should keep and which I should prune to make sure I don’t run out of storage space.  There were entire posts that I deleted to make room for new photos; I think now that I will bring some of those pictures back.  A lot of those were family pictures and I have many more since the funeral so it might keep the blog going for a bit longer.  As a mini project, it hearkens back to an assignment I did in my Intermediate Photo class, and it will be good to revisit this subject.

So here are more family hangout pictures this time post-memorial with my cousin Chris and his family.

I went back to my Nikon F2A (and good thing, too).  This is the first time I used Ilford HP5 (except for large format) and my first impression is that it’s sharp but also that it has some of the same characteristics of XP2 in its look, namely to contrast.  I’d say that they look pretty similar to each other, and a noticeably different look from my old Kodak standbys.

OK Instagram you’re forgiven (for now)…

Thankfully I’m allowed back into my Instagram account now, so the project is back on.  I’ve made sure that I have things like two-step authentication on (which is annoying) but hopefully I won’t be locked out of it again.

The story from the beginning and its continuation.

.

I take it all back: Instagram is crap

It only took a few days from me announcing it here to being locked out of my Instagram account.

Every time I log in I get the page that says nothing except “Oops, an error occurred.”  And you can’t go to anything on Instagram after that, it gives you the same page.  I’ve tried resetting my password, my replacement 8 character password will have a bunch of things added onto it every time I try and nothing changes.  There’s no explanation, no way that I can see to remedy it.  Using alternate browsers makes no difference.  Deleting all my cookies makes no difference.  They don’t have a support email account, evidently they do it all through the app, but of course I can’t use the app.  I even started a new account to ask for help but they haven’t replied.  What a piece of shit.  I should have known better than to meddle with phone apps.  At least WordPress is still here for me.

Why not start an Instagram?

Well I mean I found reasons not to do it for a long time.  But going back to my Advanced Photo class that was one thing that my instructor Stacy suggested that we all do was to keep our professional Instagram account separate from our personal one.  Well I never had a smart phone and never had Instagram…back in those days I’m not sure I could even do anything from a computer, it all had to be on the phone.  I really don’t stay connected online very well and have a very ambivalent attitude towards most social media; I’ve had Facebook since about 2005 and that’s been it, and even that has really worried me in the last half decade or so.  I don’t even know what else is out there…Flickr?  That’s all I know.

But with so many people on Instagram and it being primarily for photo sharing, I think I had it in the back of my mind enough to start an account back in 2017 or so but just sat on it since then, nothing I could do with it until recently (I’d read about workarounds but never went through the trouble of trying one).  I decided that this year’s resolution would be to get my professional account set up so I could continue the Cowboys & Jeeps project there.  And then I discovered that Instagram announced back in the Summer 2021 that people were going to be able to upload photos from their computers, making it that much easier a decision for me.

So here it is, my own Instagram dedicated to this 4-year-long (and counting) photo project, named after my AOW cowboy handle.  Instagram: Thefamouspdog  It’s been running since 4 January, 2022.  That only puts it 8 years behind this WordPress site.  But the format I have decided to take is to post one photo a day and keep that up until I run out of pictures.  If you happen to be heading that way, please check it out, and if you have any helpful suggestions that will improve my new site, and help me get noticed/recognized, please contact me.  I’m new to this.

So why did I take that step?  Because Stacy our instructor told the class that having a dedicated professional Instagram account to share only your best work was very helpful in getting noticed in the art world.  Evidently there are a lot of curators, exhibitors, et. al. who will search for up & coming artists on Instagram.  There’s a story she told us about this this one website editor (or was it magazine?) who was following a guy who only posted pictures of meat (he evidently worked in the industry).  And after about two years, there was an article being written about meat processing plants and needed pictures and this woman thought of the meat guy and reached out to him, he ended up getting a paying photo gig because of it.  So who knows, it could be the start of something.

I’m hoping that I can start up a professional portrait photography business piggybacking off this, because I think if I’m going to be getting paid for work, why not something for which I spend a lot of time doing anyway?  Next up…revamping my professional website to be more balanced between photography and music.

Not optimized

MAKE YOUR PHOTOBLOG GO FURTHER

Evidently I’ve been a bit of an ignoramus when it comes to running this site!  I’m doing more research now.  It started with this post which I thought I could possibly do without seeing as it is some old information.  But looking at the first photo there (called “weboptim”), I realized there was probably more I could do.  So thanks to this article for helping me do that.  I’ve been using Affinity Photo for nearly a year and like it a lot, it’s a great alternative to Photoshop that doesn’t cost too much and you can own it…compare to Photoshop which makes you pay a monthly subscription to use.

But I realized that my photos on here, while not necessarily large, were certainly not optimized for the Web.  And here’s what I mean:

.

One is what I’ve been uploading before, the other is after tweaking the settings, and I can’t say I notice the difference, but it’s taken what was a 3MB file down to less than 600kB.  I think this site just got some new life, but it’ll take a long time for me to go through and fix all my pics.  But if you’ve run into space issues on your site/blog I hope this will help.

Of course this comes after I’ve gone through the last few years and pruned some shots I thought were not up to my usual standards of excellence, but at least I can say I’m smarter now than I was a few days ago.

End of my rope

Site update: My inability to edit my photos is starting to catch up with me.  For the last 7.5 years I’ve been posting whatever I wanted with wild abandon.  That is coming to an end though, because I’m getting dangerously close to my upload limit.  I had about 200MB of space left, though going through some of my larger posts with some judicious editing has helped stretch that to almost 500MB so far, more to do.  As I look back on things I posted 2-3 years ago (and even in the last few weeks) there are definitely extemporaneous images in there and I’m being gentle right now but some need deep cuts.  I’ve gotten rid of a few posts altogether, deleting the corresponding pictures.

Hopefully this will help me going forward post more on-topic (and I can judge as well how much my readers enjoy certain posts by the number of likes).  And I hope that in the future I can become a better editor/curator of my own images.  Thankfully I’ve nearly always uploaded images in a standard size (watermarked) of 1500×1000, it was really to protect myself from people who might want to steal my work, but those smaller (by today’s standards) sizes have helped storage space on WordPress from becoming too much of an issue before now.

But what it all comes down to, is that The Resurrected Camera as it is here, has an expiration date.  I can’t afford to buy a yearly plan from WordPress to get more upload space (already do that for my professional site), and don’t think I see the numbers of visitors to fund it with ads or whatever, in fact I have no idea how to even set that up.  I’ve avoided Instagram for years but my photo instructor said that a professional Instagram account just for photographic work was really beneficial, and I’ve had so many people wonder why I’m not on there.  At this point I think it may be unavoidable.  So I’m not sure when I’ll stop uploading images here, or if this blog will take a different turn in the meantime.  Don’t panic yet, I have 500MB to go and have ~20 unpublished posts in the pipeline already.  But the days of this WordPress site are numbered…

TBD

To be developed: ~40+ rolls of Tri-X (shot starting May 2020), 16 sheets 4×5 film (shot March 2020 or so), a couple rolls of E6 (shot October 2020), some random stuff I haven’t sent out yet like Rerapan (shot sometime in 2020), plus about 16 rolls of Super 8, which I did in fact send off recently (shot back in Summer 2018).

Much to get to.  The black & white will take the longest because it’s pretty expensive unless I do it myself and I need to wait to get back into the school darkroom…

All this equipment…Tri-X edition

Shooting a couple rolls of Super 8 film back in April 2020 during lockdown.  So here is the time delay between the immediacy of the digital camera on my phone and getting film developed, getting around to scanning it, and finally getting to the order in the queue.  But hopefully it was worth the wait!

It was more to test out my cameras than anything, but if I put my mind to it I might be able to turn it all into an “experimental” short.

Workflow adjustments and Fall colors

It’s a time of change for me: I’m examining workflow which has been stilted since COVID started; I haven’t even edited any photos in almost a year now but there’s been such a backlog it hasn’t been a problem.  My old way was to scan everything on the Pakon, export to TIFF and stick it on a flash drive, then take it down to school the next time I was there and use their computers and copy of Adobe Photoshop CS6 to adjust contrast/exposure until I got what I wanted.  Now with color negative there wasn’t a whole lot to do, the Pakon’s color profiles are fantastic, so I’d generally accept the JPG output, resize it, watermark it, and call it a day.

With the lockdown and finishing up of all photo classes I haven’t been down there, and the only option I had was to use Photoshop 7 that was installed on my WinXP machine I use hooked up to the Pakon.  I have a Win7 laptop but its display is a bit off as is the monitor on the WinXP machine; I have a few rolls of black & white that I’ve had developed and didn’t want to do anything with them until I had a chance to really set everything correctly, but I finally scanned 3 rolls of color negative and would have just posted them straight from the Pakon.  It would have been fine and they would have looked like this:

(that’s the old original watermark which is the only one I happened to have on my WinXP machine at the time)

However, thanks to being blessed with a new (to me) laptop, I feel comfortable with editing photos at home; this is a big change for me! It’s more powerful and seems to be pretty well calibrated in the screen department so I’m planning to dedicate this machine primarily to photo editing purposes.  I’m not about to pay money on a monthly basis to Adobe for a program that I can’t own so I’ve been exploring Photoshop alternatives.  Currently I’m using a free trial version of Affinity Photo which seems to be not too dissimilar.  It’s allowed me to tweak the levels, etc, while still keeping a very similar workflow.  Here are the results so far:

So a bit more contrast, somewhat darker, and I’m playing around with a few different watermarks: I think this is the new look of The Resurrected Camera.

This is Kodak Gold 200 exposed at ASA100 in 3 different Nikon bodies I picked up last year, I wanted to check out the 1/1000 shutter speeds to make sure that the shutter curtains were in sync.  I used an expired roll of film I bought years ago and color negative is the cheapest to develop; around $4.00 at my local camera store.  This also happened to coincide with the leaves changing in Fall so I ended up shooting several rolls of color around the end of September/beginning of October.  I generally don’t do much on the post-side of things, just adjust the curves to get proper contrast and light levels; I gave a general idea of this here.