As part of digitizing my photo archive I own a high speed film scanner:
I’d like to bring it in for a “scan day” so people can bring their film, B&W color or unmounted slide film, rolls or cut (even single frames), most formats (see website), and get 24MP NEF and/or JPG scans. If you’re a Lightroom Classic user I can export them as a catalog. Otherwise, you can walk away with raw files and converted JPGs. You would just bring your film and a thumb drive or external drive. It will scan a 36" roll of film in a minute or two.
Let me know if this sounds interesting and approximately how much and what type of film you think you’d want to scan and whether you are a Lightroom Classic so I can get an idea of how the set up and schedule might work.
Note: This scanner won’t handle mounted slides, but I have a separate scanner for that and we can tackle that one later on.
That actually sounds pretty amazing. I’ve digitized old family photos by using one of those epson fast-foto scanners on old 4×6 prints of various quality. This sounds like it would give a way better result for the photos I can find the negatives for.
Scanning the negs definitely gives you a better result. As I’m sure you’ve noticed, scans from 4x6 prints can’t really be enlarged. There’s only so much data printed on the paper and enlargements fall apart pretty quickly!
Uncut rolls go really fast. My assistant had to scan hundreds of pages of cut negatives. Getting them in and out of the sheets was almost as much work as the scans themselves
I used a service to scan 10K+ slides and negatives of all sizes. It was a laborious and expensive year-long process. Your system looks very interesting, and I wish I’d had access to it.
One of the challenges I had was assigning capture dates to them before importing into Lightroom. I ended up moving them to dated folders, then used a DOS batch file to change the capture dates to the folder date (and add copyright info) using EXIFtool. Then I created profiles in Lightroom Classic to fill in other metadata (like location, photographer or source, etc) and applied them groups of pictures in bulk. It worked pretty well, but it was time-consuming.
sorry for the delay. Evidently my notifications aren’t working. .
We used date and batch naming while capturing. There’s a nice LR utility that will copy any field to any other field, so we also copied filename data into a metadata field in case the filenames were messed with.
For prints, same 105 macro lens on a stout lightstand with a pair of high CRI led lamps. Polarizers all around when needed.
