Randall's Photo Blog

I have a lot of old negatives from years of photography before digital became affordable (for me this was 2002). I have used a "slide scanner" in the past to digitize slides and negatives but it is a really SLOW process. I have tried several flatbed scanners as well and some are not too bad. None were fast enough for me, though. I came up with something that seems to be working.

I am using my Canon Rebel XT with a 50mm macro lens and an extension tube. I set up a cardboard cover for a small light table and I used a negative guide from an old scanner to position the negative strips. This part is pretty simple. The tricky part for me was automating the computer workflow after I made the copy. The digital image is a negative and has to be color balanced. I found that if I had even a sliver of the surrounding film in the frame it would throw off the "auto levels" and I would have to crop & tweak each negative. This is why I placed the empty slide holder above the negative holder (see photo). If I carefully align the camera to the slide holder (the camera is on a sturdy tripod) I can quickly slide the negatives underneath and snap away. I can digitize a half dozen rolls of negatives in less than 45 minutes.

After I load the digital images on to the computer I can use batch commands to invert and auto level each one. The results aren't perfect - the color is sometimes still off but it's not bad. Best of all it's fast.

Finally, a recent sunset:

R