I, too, have a similar setup (with a lightpad). Didn’t yet think about the vibrations, good point. I shoot color slides with bracketing (Magic Lantern) and merge them with HDRMerge.
Best,
Flössie
Flössie, just wondering if you’re shooting these raw. I’m shooting raw, processing in Rawtherapee and I really don’t think I have any clipping of highlights or shadows when carefully compared to the original 35mm slides or other film types. The dynamic range of the raw files is much greater than that of slide film.
Scott, I somewhere read it was 14 EV for slides, and my Canon isn’t a DR beast. I used Magic Lantern auto-bracketing and it produced three to five shots each 2 EV apart. But I usually throw away the brightest one(s). So basically two shots usually do. And it could well be, that one was enough, maybe I was overcautious…
Ah, and yes: I shoot raw, I must confess. 
Flössie, I’ve noticed a significant improvement in both shadow and highlight detail when I started using a DSLR for scanning instead of a scanner, with the same slides or negatives. For instance, when zooming into dark shadows, slides I scanned with other scanners such as the Minolta Dimage Multi Scan Pro with Vuescan show noise and posterisation. The D800 scans are very clean in the same areas, with smooth transitions between the dark tones.
Similarly, I re-scanned some medium and large-format B&W negatives with the D800. The improvement in dark areas of the final image (light areas of the negative) is striking when compared to scans I did on an Epson 4990 with Vuescan. I don’t know whether this an issue with the scanner hardware, Vuescan software, or the setting I was using with Vuescan.
Do you have any experience with color negatives? I bought a KB12/80B filter for not clipping the red channel too early but had troubles getting good colors back in RawTherapee. I showed one example to @Morgan_Hardwood and he suspected the filter for my problems. Maybe I’ll give it another try without the filter this year if time permits. BTW, I also use the Sigma 70 2.8 EX for the job.
I don’t have a lot of colour negs, but have experimented with some. I’ve been able to get decent results in Rawtherapee by inverting, getting a white balance off of the orange mask between frames, then adjusting the colour temperature and tint. That profile can be saved for other negs from the same film type. It’s much more difficult for my dad’s colour negs as they are badly faded. Sometimes I just convert them to B&W. Fortunately he didn’t shoot too many colour negs, at least in material that’s important. I’ll post an example of one of mine.
This is scanned from a 6x7 Fuji colour neg. Cropped for the privacy of the models. Shot with a Nikon D7100 and processed in Rawtherapee.
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Very nice! I’ll sure try without the filter.
I’ve also done tests with processing the Nikon .NEF files with Vuescan. It works fine, but I’m able to get better colour by processing the same files with Rawtherapee.
This is a great effort to do all these cloning and healing. I have lots of negatives that were stained. Have lots of trouble to remove it.
I’m interested in this topic as my parents did a lot of ice tours when they were young. So we find great information here.
It would be great if you would work together to create an article for pixls.us with all the information how to create a setup for taking photos of film negatives. Using rawtherapee invert or darktable negadocotor would be antoher topic 
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Andreas, I covered some of my setup in this thread. DIY copy stand for DSLR scanning
Also, this thread has good info about the RawTherapee film negative tool, which I found very useful.
Pat David and I are discussing an article.
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