New Film user question

[alun]

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Gawain, I'll toss in a couple of comments but you may have stopped watching this thread... I can see that one of the attractions may well be processing film yourself, but if time is tight (you have a young family, I think you said) then as long as you have access to a decent lab you could consider going down the dev-and-scan route. This is what I do with all the film I shoot (although currently and for some time now it's been all C41). A year or two back I did own a scanner (a Minolta of some description). It was fankly a pain and was quite glad when it broke down in under a year.

 

At that point I investigated commercial scanning -- and found it relatively speaking so cheap that I wondered why I was bothering to do it myself. The pro lab I use (Gaffney Metrolab) charges about GBP 6.75 a 36-exp roll to develop and scan to CD (I have everything scanned at a perfectly adequate 18Mb). Many will say that adds up over time, and of course it does, but scanning at three quid a roll or thereabouts seems a bargain to me -- and I end up with the negs, the CD and the images I copy to my hard drive -- instant backing-up.

 

These are subjective choices, I know, but if time for photography is precious and has to be fitted in around other commitments then having someone else do the heavy lifting might be the answer....

[topoxforddoc]

Gawain,

 

Most of my B/W film gets scanned (on my old Minolta 5400 Scan Elite) and printed on my Epson 3800 printer. I still do occasional wet prints in my darkroom.

 

If all you shoot is 35mm, then the Nikon 9000 is a bit of overkill - lovely but it's over two grand. Buy a 5000 or a second hand Minolta 5400 (using Vuescan) and use the change to buy an Epson 3880 and a shed load of paper and ink.

 

I

 

Charlie, I too use a Minolta 5400 Elite and find it gives good quality scans but is sloooow - especially with 16 bit and multiple samples. Does Vuescan improve performance?

 

Mike.

 

Mike,

 

I just scan on my 5400 Scan Elite with a single pass at max 5400 resolution and 16 bit gray on Vuescan - takes about 90-120 secs a scan.

[biglouis]

Gawain

 

I agree with other posters that now is not the time to sell an M8 and in any case if time is precious to you then film is possibly not the way to go.

 

That said, some people here know I have gone back into film and I am enjoying it but I am also having my films developed and scanned for me - which is bit like having an arms length digital camera.

 

I did own and M6TLL in the past but this time round I obtained a M7 (check out R G Lewis because they seem to be fireselling stuff at present, or maybe it was my lucky day). Anyhoo, one reason I went with an M7 is that it is very like the M8. In Auto mode you get the speed shown in the display which works very well for me as I am used to metering various parts of my capture and then choosing a speed and locking it for the frame with the M8 and it is identical in the M7.

 

I know a lot of emotional stuff is said about the feel and beauty of working with a Leica film camera. Unfortunately, it is all true: I really like working with my M7 a lot more than M8 but there again the truth is that it is horses for courses!

 

Anyway, whatever your decision there is lots of good, free advice here as you have discovered.

 

LouisB

[damaso]

The workflow with scanning is very similar to making test prints in the wet darkroom. I have found the results, with a dedicated film scanner, to be excellent.

[Mike Rawcs]

 

Mike,

 

I just scan on my 5400 Scan Elite with a single pass at max 5400 resolution and 16 bit gray on Vuescan - takes about 90-120 secs a scan.

 

Thanks Charlie. Gawain, if you go for develop and scan (I do) this is something that you will have to consider. I have been scanning colour negs on my Minolta 5400 Elite at 16 bit and multiple scan (8 times) and I get great scans - very film-like. I also get very large 233 Mb Tiff files and each scan takes about 30 minutes!

 

No-doubt this is overkill for many purposes but why have a multiple scan feature if you don't use it or, even more to the point, don't need it? I suppose I could do a single scan of the whole roll of film and then re-scan the keepers but I know that, as my negative collection grows, there is little chance of me re-scanning at a later date. Same goes for metadata: add it now because you won't want to add it to thousands of frames later.

 

Mike.

[Mike Rawcs]

The workflow with scanning is very similar to making test prints in the wet darkroom. I have found the results, with a dedicated film scanner, to be excellent.

 

Good point Damaso! When I used a darkroom I would make a contact print and then choose which photographs to print: why should the scanning process be any different? I'll try a one- pass scan and make a contact print in Aperture. I believe that I can print and also save the contact sheet. Then I can multi-scan just the keepers. It MUST be faster than scanning every frame with multiple scans!

 

 

Mike.

[Barrington]

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It's very rare that I take any colour as B&W is my preferred medium which I develop at home.Most of my shots are taken on HP5,although I do sometimes use FP4,Pan F or Delta 3200.With the exception of the D3200,I dev in Ilfosol 3 which is a good,all-round brew.I have found faster films are better stewed in ID11 even if it is a bit of a faff to mix.I still print my best pictures the proper way with an enlarger.I don't have a darkroom though but I am able to set one up temporarily as and when I need to.If I want to get my pictures into my computer I use an Epson F3200 multi format film scanner.They are very handy if you also shoot other formats like MF or LF (or even X-pan!) and it will scan negs up to 5x4.Originally it was about £700 but I bet you could get a secondhand one for lots less these days.It's highest default scan resolution is 3200dpi (as the name suggests) but it will go higher than that by interpolation up to 12800dpi.I have never used it at that setting and I get cracking results even as low as 1200dpi.Excellent results and well worth tracking one down.

 

As to meters,I mainly use a Weston Master V which is fine in daylight but rubbish when it gets dark so,for low light pictures I use a Gossen Digisix which is a tiny (but very handy) digital meter.If you have something like an M with no metering then one of these is ideal as you can buy a little adaptor which enables you to slot it into the accessory shoe of your camera.They are about £100 for the meter and a tenner for the adaptor.Speedgraphic in the UK sell both.

 

Barrington.

[giordano]

The pro lab I use (Gaffney Metrolab) charges about GBP 6.75 a 36-exp roll to develop and scan to CD (I have everything scanned at a perfectly adequate 18Mb). Many will say that adds up over time, and of course it does, but scanning at three quid a roll or thereabouts seems a bargain to me -- and I end up with the negs, the CD and the images I copy to my hard drive -- instant backing-up.

 

Alun, would you mind saying exactly what they sell as an "18 MB" scan? I looked at the Metrolab website and couldn't find details.

 

When I tried a lab in Brighton a year or two back, their "25 MB" scans came as JPEGs of about 2 MB. If they'd been TIFFs they'd have been 25 MB (i.e. the pixel dimensions were OK) but they were so highly compressed that the fine detail wasn't there and the JPEG artifacts were all too prominent. I complained but they weren't interested.

[tmickan]

Gawain, I'm sorry I haven't read all the posts above so I may be just repeating other's sentiments. Firstly, congratulations on the decision to graduate to film.

 

I am a wedding photog and I shoot with two film M's. I use the MP an the M7, however I have always liked to hand meter, and I just trust it more. I had a Minolta IVf which I recently sold and replaced with the smaller Sekonic L308 (?). It's a great little meter, and it was cheap.

 

I develop all of my own black and white, but I use my lab for colour. I nearly shoot exclusively in black and white for my personal shooting/projects, but for wedding, my clients mostly prefer colour. I will often convert the colour to mono in LR, and my clients are happy with that. I used to use digital for my weddings, finishing up with the Nikon D3's. Now that I have gone back to film, my post workflow has been been reduced dramatically. I simply shoot the wedding, drop the film at the lab, and a week later I get the high res scans back, along with my archive sleeved negs. The best of both worlds. I do scan my own colour negs from time to time, and scan all of my black and white stuff. So I can choose how much I want to work on my computer with these images, but there is always some PC work to be done.

 

As for your question on results....well at the end of the day, my clients don't care if I took the shot on an M8, an MP, a Holga or a Hasselblad. All they care for is the look, and film gives a look that is very hard to replicate with digital. But I think the biggest think that digicam users underestimate, at least for now, is the archivability of their 1's and 0's. As I alluded to above, I have the same options that any digicam user has when it comes to image storage and backup, but I have the most important thing. I have a negative which, if looked after, is good for maybe 500 years. With a digitgal image, you will spend the rest of your life nurturing it, making sure it is readable in the current format, but then your children, and grandchildren also need to do the same thing over the course of their lives. I keep my negs in archival sleeves, in archival boxes, in a temperature stable environment.