Scanning

Ross's old red sweater
Originally uploaded by Apocaplops

Catching up on scanning is fun sometimes, much as I hate doing the tedious work. I found some really nice negatives in my folder just waiting to be processed, some from over a year ago. Most are from the Mamiya Press, and certainly have a great quality to them.

On another note, I'm seriously thinking about making 2009 be the year of the Mamiya, and perhaps only using that camera all year. I dunno. It would certainly be a fun experiment.

Scanning Negatives is bad for the Psyche

Hawk Island Park: Bench in Winter
Originally uploaded by Apocaplops

Scanning negatives is the only thing holding me back from using my Mamiya Press more or less constantly. I love the heft of the camera, the photos are beautiful, and I work pretty well with it. The negatives are super-detailed from edge to edge, and it suits a photojournalistic style well.

But honestly, you can only understand how much pain scanning can cause when you scan a medium format 6x9 negative on an old flatbed scanner through a USB 1.1 connection onto an old iMac. It's torturous. And when it finally is done scanning, I have to go through the whole photo and retouch all the dust so it doesn't look terrible, crop out the edges, and hope there are no terrible scanning artifacts. Ugh, what a process. I can only get through maybe two photos from start to finish before I have to get up and do something else.

I can see why people praise digital so much. Sure the final image isn't really as good in many ways, but boy you sure don't have to jump through any hoops to get there. Shoot, transfer, process - it's got to be about 10x quicker than scanning medium format film.

I guess I could do better with faster equipment, but that would cost quite a bit, so I'll be torturing myself a while longer yet. It's worth the effort.