Analog film photography and cameras

Thanks for the input folks. I'll try a different company for dev and scan services in the first instance then. Used filmprocessing this time. The people shots are well scanned, the landscape ones not so much.

Is there such a ting as a cheap 110 & 35mm negative scanner? My parents have just found a load of my old negatives and I don't have the actual prints. I would love to be able to scan them in on a budget.

There's cheap 35mm ones but I've never heard of cheap 110 ones (there's adapters from 35 to 110 for the more expensive scanners, but this route will likely be over your budget)..

..remember you can "scan" film using a digital camera as well though (if you have a somewhat recent smartphone this will most likely be sufficient / actually really good) -
you need a light table (check ebay / classifieds, or DIY with some light source & frosted glass that gives even light under the negatives).
The fiddly bit will be to hold the negatives flat, frankly holding them down with, say, two steel rulers will probably work better than all the plastic negative holders the aforementioned scanners use.

Thanks, I found a light table last night at home after posting and tried it roughly with my phone and had okish results. I think the light could have been brighter though.

Here's my phone based lash-up: MDF box, 12v LED, light box acrylic and a 3D printed structure that holds the negative strip flat, masks each frame to prevent exposure problems, aligns the camera parallel to the negative, and carries a salvaged lens which allows a low spec phone to cover the negative without silly zoom levels.

It's not marvellous, but good enough to avoid the need to set up an enlarger or drag out a Windows XP machine to drive an ancient PlusTek 7200...

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... with this level of result. Some cropping and inverting in Corel Photopaint, followed by 'auto-equalize' as a quick and dirty fix for the LED colour balance.

There's obviously some distortion - when I find the time I'll try a different lens, and print a bigger carrier so the phone is properly supported.

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Bloody hell, that is amazing. I'll try something over the weekend and report back.

It helps if you can do a bit of woodwork and happen to have a 3D printer!

That's some proper MacGuyver shit! 😀

Two questions:

• is that a car battery?!
  
• what is that lens actually for (why don't you just use the macro mode of your phone)?
  

It's a 12V gel battery about 150mm long - standby battery for an alarm system, 'rescued' from a skip at work. Normally I'd use a mains adapter, but it happened to be on the bench at the time.

The lens was needed for use with my previous phone - a Nokia slide (2200?) with limited capabilities: nailing an additional lens in front made enough of a difference.

Current phone is an elderly Galaxy A10 - as far as I know, it doesn't have a macro mode. Will investigate Mrs. E's (newer) phone and report back...

For comparison:
Nokia 3.1 plus, external lens, 2560 x 1920
Nokia slide 3600, external lens, 1280 x 960 pixels
Nokia 3.1 plus, macro mode, 2560 x 1920
I had some difficulty in focussing in 'macro' mode - had to find things to stand the phone on, lifting it to around 105mm before it could focus - possibly a newer / higher spec phone would do it better?

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Ha, the external lens delivers the best quality 👍

possibly a newer / higher spec phone would do it better?

Yea, definitely.
I had an old iPhone 6 until last year and then upgrade to a 14 Pro last year, it's nuts.

This is holding a strip of slide film in front of a piece of paper in front of my window -

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Impressive.

What you're telling me is that I can scrap a 10 year old phone, 15 year old film scanner, and a 20 year old desktop computer (retained mainly to drive the scanner) and replace all of it with an iPhone.

I might go and re-varnish my pinhole cameras while thinking this through...

If I had the time I'd build some sort of "scanning station" like the one you have, and re-"scan" some of the negatives I have with the iPhone, to see how they compare to the original scans (done with a Quato / Plustek dedicated 35mm scanner, years ago).

Fun fact: I did use this scanner with an old Windos XP laptop back in the day, onto which I istalled Windows 10 at some point - only to realize a few weeks later that there's no way on earth I'll get drivers for that scanner that work with Win10 🤪

Yeah prices seem extremely high huh. I’ve just managed to get one for £75 off eBay in the end. It was mislabelled as an XA1, which I think worked in my favour!

Ah! It sure did!

Those iPhone ‘scans’ are as lot nicer than what I’m getting out of my actual film scanner.

I could definitely get a scanner with better res but I got the one I did because it can be work as a standalone, saving images to an sd card. Which I used to be able to read with my iPhone and a card reader but the last ios update fucked that.

Anyway, here’s a couple images from a film I scanned recently with it…

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I just got this Nikon ES-2 copy from JJC (half price with a light source (not pictured!) and started digitising my films.

Such a quicker process with higher quality than a scanner!

I'm also printing them myself with a Epson photo printed

PS the print is from Ilford own service!

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Whilst this is my own print

Notice how Ilford's print has lost much details in the highlights and also cropped the photo

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If you want to shoot film in 2024 the best way is probably to buy a bulk loader for 35mm film into used canisters, keep it in your fridge. Bulk load Kentmere and process it yourself (in Rodinal).

There is outlay for your Pattison tank, a bulk loader and some quality masking tape, then it's pennies. Probably £4 a roll all-in.

For me the 'cost' of analogue photography is time (spent scanning - which I don't really like).

Thanks, thats good to know, I've never done processing myself but I would like to give it a go!

Is there a go to place that people are buying film at the mo?

There is outlay for your Pattison tank, a bulk loader and some quality masking tape, then it's pennies. Probably £4 a roll all-in.

Is Kentmere much more than £4 a roll anyway?

Sorry. Not sure what you’re asking? Kentmere is about ~ £5.50. But that’s before processing.

What’s the best App for inverting negatives?

I bought a little neg holder with light box
Is there recommend free app to convert neg images