The Scanning Project

1) Introduction

The aim of this continuing series is to describe my experiences and hopefully encourage you to start your own scanning project. I will cover topics such as editing for scanning, working with various film types and formats, using flatbed and “dedicated” film scanners, and different software programs. I welcome your comments and suggestions.

This project is not aimed at archivists at large institutions who have access to very high end scanning systems, but is more suited to those with medium-size image collections who want to digitize their film work within a budget and with equipment that does not require an advanced degree to operate. It is also aimed at those who remain dedicated to film capture but want to output on inkjet printers or for web albums. The procedures discussed are also useful for small museums, historical societies and collectors who have  negatives, prints and even glass plates and want to preserve and perhaps enhance those images.

Like many folks who made photos during the film days, I disassembled my darkroom years back. I contributed the equipment to schools that still teach the chemical craft. 

Yet, I still had boxes and sleeves with transparencies and black and white negatives and slides of various formats that might not ever see the light of a print again—were it not for the ability to scan and digitize the images for web publishing and inkjet printing.

This scan from a 5x7 glass plate negative purchased at a flea market was made on a flatbed scanner using the “negative” scan mode, which converted it to a positive image, which was then processed to enhance contrast and clean up flaws in the emulsion. Photographer: Unknown.

Somehow I felt I owed it to the work done and time spent and visions captured to at least make the effort to transfer them to a medium that allowed me to both re-explore the work and manifest it in some fashion. While my main medium during those film days was black and white negatives, I also had lots of slides in both 35mm and medium format, and a scattering of color negatives and some chromogenic film (film that could be processed in color chemistry yet that lacked color dye layers so it was essentially a black-and-white medium.)

As I considered this task it became clear to me that this was not something I could do in a week or even a year. I have been photographing for almost 40 years and amassed a large collection of images. I had thankfully done culling throughout those years, yet I was still confronted by thousands of images in different formats and film types. The ones I kept were for sentimental reasons, because I thought they were good images that defined my vision and photographic quests, and simply because I just couldn’t make up my mind whether to keep or chuck them on my edit go-rounds.

That’s when the importance of editing became apparent to me, and while this is personal to each and every photographer it is an essential part of the process. (I can only imagine what future photographers will face when confronted in the future with the horde of digital images they have made.) I was never shy about using film and shooting a brick of film (20 rolls) on various stock and assignment jaunts, but digital encourages overshooting, what with the erase-ability of memory cards and high framing rates and super-automation that makes it all a pushbutton affair.

Luckily, in my past position as editor of various photo magazines, I had access to and tested numerous types of scanners and software along the way. During that period I would spend an intense week or more with each type of scanner and software and learn their capabilities and foibles to write my reviews and articles. But I never quite had the time to take on the “big project” of addressing all my past images, although the lessons learned during that time served as a good basis for the task at hand.

Next posting: An Outline of the Project