Filing a Digital Negative Carrier

[danmerkdotcom]

I have an old Nikon LS-10e film scanner. I recently have been scanning my film to

make digital prints for art-sake. I miss using my darkroom where I like the filed

negative carrier look of my borders. Since I packed up the darkroom due to chemistry

and paper costs, I lose this technique. I have read a few posts about how to use

Photoshop's Displacement effect. But this seems a bit "forced" and not so natural. I

keep looking at my scanner's film holder and or Gepe's slide holders and wonder if

filing these would produce that natural filed look I desire. Is this a waste of time?

Anyone else with a solution?

 

Also, how bad would it be to scan a few borders I have already printed in the past and

re-use these around my newer prints to get that effect too? Is that unethical?

Comments appreciated in advance.

[andy_piper2]

Good questions. The LS-10 has a fully-plastic carrier, as I recall (I upgraded to an LS-1000 about 7 years ago). It should be possible to file out the plastic windows, if you have an afternoon to kill while watching old movies.

 

The usual caveat - fine-sand the edges afterwards to avoid film scratches from plastic 'spurs'.

 

My LS-1000 carrier has plastic sleeves inside a metal carrier - the metal windows are large enough that I could get black borders if I filed the plastic windows out to the same size - but they would not be big enough to include sprocket holes/edge numbers.

 

Mostly, I just add black borders by selecting a slightly feathered (to simulate the slightly soft edge of the neg produced by the camera's film gate) border in Photoshop and filling it with black.

 

If I have a neg where I really need "everything" the camera put on film for composition reasons - I switch to the Epson 3200 scanner, whose film holders have a wider opening than the 24mm image width, and no dividers between frames. The Epson is a bit fuzzier and slower than the Nikon, or I'd use it exclusively.

 

With 6x6 and 4x5 using the Epson, real black borders are a snap. I even get to show the cool garbage around the edges of my 4x5 Polaroids.

 

As to the ethics of adding a border - jeez, I don't know. HC-B added borders to a few of his pictures that needed cropping, just to keep them consistent with his images that worked full-frame. Some people add them with pens after the fact, even to traditional silver prints (which IMHO looks cheesy).

 

If your borders include the frame number, people may get suspicious when they notice that, by funny coincidence, all your best shots always seem to get taken on frame "24A". 8^)

 

There are film-edge border images for sale - so I can't see that it's less ethical to use your own personal borders, authentically produced "by the artist himself."<div></div>

[danmerkdotcom]

Was just thinking, people filed a negative carrier to gain more access to the image. Te

result was a interesting looking border with reflections of the neg carrier. That was

cool for 'analog' process. After seeing your shot, and knowing that you scanned that

on a flatbed, perhaps that tiny little border is the result of *this* process.

 

I am going to rethink my needs here. Having a small border still demonstrates a 'film'

process. This is what I was looking for, thanks!

[michael_matsil]

Daniel.......I like your thinking, brother!