I love film.
I love composing and framing the picture, I love the sound of the shutter. I love the expectation to see the end result. But scanning film has been tedious, prone to mistakes, and botched results. Most of it is due to a new scanning process I am working with… scanning film with a camera.
A couple of months ago my scanner Epson v600 got broken. Nothing I could do. Since then I have been comparing the quality of the photos out of this scanner with a few that came directly from a lab in USA. There was definitely a gap, a huge gap in quality. Out my ignorance I realized there are scanners, and there are high quality very expensive scanners.
After doing some research in trying to understand the issues, I came upon a video about film scanning with a DSLR, which gave me some hope, and since I didn't want to spend too much money I acquired the basics, plus some stuff I already have and started scanning film. Man, some crappy results, and the some more.
Today I woke up early to try a few ideas and voilá… much better results! There is hope! I repeated the process with that one picture I had pubilshed a few days ago on Instagram, and "SHAZAAAM!!!”… it was so beautiful I couldn't believe it. I scanned a few more, some good, some great, but it is a learning process.
Let me share with you a few pictures I recently took when vacationing with my family in Boquete and the basic setup I am currently using. For editing I still use Adobe Lightroom, and for converting negative to positive film I found this add-on called Negative Lab Pro that is helping me a lot.
