Old Photo That I Think Is Neat

[curritch]

My cousin recently provided me a quantity of old family B&W negatives for me to

turn into something that we could look at to see if there was anything of

interest. My technique is to mount my D50 on an old enlarger stand and to put

the negatives on a light table to photograph them. And then let PS do its magic

and invert the images. This is much faster than scanning them and actually

works quite well.

 

The results ranged from bad to excellent dependent on the quality of the negative.

 

But I discovered one photo (attached) that to me is almost a work of abstract art.

 

This is a photo of my Mom taken in the late 20's or early 30's with a box camera.

 

The result is quite accidental but quite good, at least to me.<div></div>

[lex_jenkins]

That's lovely! I try to recreate this type of look with modern equipment but rarely succeed. Perhaps it's the absence of context that makes it difficult to recreate such photos.

 

Gene M, on the Classic Cameras Forum, has made something of an art form of developing old rolls of "found" film in cameras he buys. He uploads samples, along with gently humorous commentary, to his website.

[Hector Javkin]

It's a lovely photograph. The photographer must have put the camera on the table to steady it. I love the movement of the arm and hand. I guess I'd fix a couple of the black spots, like the one above and behind her shoulder.

 

Having tried almost exactly what you did, of using a D50 to photograph slides on a light table, I'm sure that, on many photographs, you can get better results with a scanner. No disagreement about which method is faster, though.

[lex_jenkins]

BTW, several years ago, after I got my first film scanner, I compared results using a light table and macro lens on a digital camera with the film scanner. The quality was surprisingly comparable. While the film scanner was easier for 35mm negatives and slides, the "old fashioned" copy camera trick works fine for odd sized negatives and prints. I've used my D2H and macro lens to copy old family photos for which the negatives were long gone.

[oskar_ojala]

Interesting.

 

About the technique, I have a thread going about this copy-technique, started a couple of days ago. My impression from my testing is that a 12 mpix DSLR can come up to the quality of an entry-level scanner. When 24 mpix DSLRs enter the market en masse, I think those could do the digitization very nicely.

 

It's an entirely other matter whether you have 12 mpix (or even 6 mpix as is the case with D50) worth of data on what you scan; those box cameras were not that sharp and even SLRs with primes may not always produce that good results.

[curritch]

Oskar you're right that many of the old negatives are within the D50's capability. But many of the old large format box camera negatives are surprisingly good. The attached photo is one of my Mom's family taken with good light and a steady handed photographer in the mid 20's. I don't know the film size but the negative measures 2.5X4.25 inches. You can't really tell from this photo but the negative was clearly better than the D50's ability to resolve it. I could have used a 12 or 24 mpix camera here.<div></div>

[keith_lubow]

This is how my old work used to create quick digital archives of vintage negs for licensing purposes, and also as a final digitization in most instances. We had a project that involved the captioning, cataloging, selection, restoration, digitizing, resleeving, and labeling of about 70,000 negs from the same photographer. The method was preferred o a scanner because the scanners captured too much dust, scratches, and other details. The camera was a Canon 1Ds on a copy stand with a 50mm macro lens. Most of the negs were black and white 4x5 sheets with some 35mm, 5x7, medium format, and other sizes we don't have today. Great stuff from the oughts to the thirties.

 

So, yes. This is a great way to digitaze files, IF you have a good setup. I would recommend a macro lens, high quality anti-newton glass, black cropping Ls to mask off the edges of the light box, and the best quality light box you can afford. Also, tethering and an AC cable helps a lot.

 

Keith

[oskar_ojala]

The second photo is pretty nice, they don't make emulsions like they used to... That neg size is indeed a lot for 6 mpix, even with an old camera. A flatbed scanner would do nicely, but I've also been thinking about a movable board for moving the film in order to take several exposures and then stitch them together.

 

Oh well, 6 mpix is not too bad anyway...

[photo5]

This thread should be moved to the Photo Critique forum.