Analog Photography -- Show Your Scans and Processing Results

Maybe, I’m not the only one here, who likes to shoot with analog cameras from time to time :slight_smile: I enjoy to develop the films on my own (at least b/w film) and afterwards I scan the negatives and process them.

I’m opening this thread to encourage you to show your analog photographs and to talk about related equipment and your way of processing the images using free software.

A while ago I purchased a Pentax 6x7 medium format camera with a 90mm 2.8 lens. Such cameras are (were?) quite affordable and scanning medium format negatives does not require such expensive scanner hardware. My scanner is a Epson V700 with transparency unit. Additionally I use special glass elements that I put on top of the film strips, which ensures that the film strip is perfectly flat.

I would like to start with a series of 6 images that I shot in one of my favorite spots in my home town

All taken with the Pentax 6x7, HP5+ at ISO 400. The “chemical raw converter” was Ilfosol 3, 1:14.

For scanning I used x-sane (once I found out how to make it work with the transparency unit). I scanned at 3200 dpi as color positive into 16bit tiff files (quite large :wink: ). The final processing was done in darktable. Here I did not use the invert module. Although, it is quite convenient, I preferred to use the tone curve for inversion, including adjustment of black and white point. A second tone curve instance was used for adjusting the actual luminance curve. Here is a screen shot:


Basically, curves were all that I used beside cropping.

Ok, so now I’m curious about your analog photos :slight_smile:

7 Likes

Your shots look great. I have photos that I could share. One question, from whence cometh the blue splotches in the water on the last image. They look similar to those over-exposed warnings I get when processing through software that provides them.

Curious, that’s all.

Caruso

thanks :slightly_smiling_face:

Yes it is darktable’s over/under exposure indicator. I activated it for black/whitepoint adjustment.

I’ve got boxes full of negatives from my old film days. All 110 size, and many of them black and white. I’ve experimented with some diy rigs to “scan” them with my camera, but I don’t have a real macro lens (just some macro filters), and I’ve not been able to get then to lie perfectly flat, so the results have been not great. But I definitely want to digitize them at some point, so your workflow here is very useful for me. Thanks for sharing!

I also shot a Ektar 100 roll, which was expired since 11 2014. I guess this is why the colors are a little off. However, I somehow like them anyway :slight_smile:

out-0009

out-0011

1 Like

The color pallet is pleasing, very dreamy