I was lucky enough to get a nice nearly mint Swiss Alpina 4x5" large format camera. So I started using 4x5" negative film (currently T-Max 100 film). I have an old HP flatbed scanner, but scanning the negative did not work well - the digitized files came out all too dark. Even when I tried backlighting the negative on top with a light table, the scanning remained very poor. Best I found so far was using my tripod/camera setup with 50 mm macro lens and the negative on a light table below. I took two overlapping photos which I stiched together to get the full 4x5" digitized negative. I do not want to vest into a dedicated 4x5" negative scanner at this point either (too expensive IMO).
Is there a better way to digitize 4x5" negatives? Any advice how to use my flatbed scanner for this to avoid to get too dark files?