burkphoto wrote:
I built this rig out of an enlarger negative carrier, a flash bracket, some old magnets, tape, glue, popsicle sticks, the cardboard backing from a legal pad, and scrap wood from the box frame a ping-pong table came in. The light source is a 5000K CFL in a fixture made from a porcelain socket in a 100' 35mm film can. It's diffused with several sheets of translucent paper. It works great. I will probably build a better light box and use milk plexiglass to diffuse multiple lamps, for smoother and brighter illumination. For color work, I'll probably switch to photo grade LED lights for their better spectral output.
One thing I have learned... To maximize sharpness, the emulsion of the film MUST face the camera (as it would in any optical printer). You can flip the images in software.
For negatives, I invert images in Photoshop, or invert the curves in Lightroom. Then I flip the images, rotate them, crop them, and adjust them. I have saved several presets to automate some of this.
The raw files give me plenty of latitude to pull just about anything out of the negative or slide that is there. The tools in Lightroom allow tonal adjustments with a granularity that is not possible in any conventional photo lab. If you print to a high end (such as the Epson SureColor P series) inkjet printer on fine art paper, canvas, or inkjet photo paper, the result is a print that can last five times longer than conventional silver halide prints.
The Lumix does a fine job. It reproduces the film grain sharply, and appears to make just as sharp or sharper image than I made optically with an EL Nikkor enlarger lens, several decades ago, from the same negatives. Using noise reduction and careful sharpening in Lightroom can retain sharpness while subduing the effect of the film grain.
I'm exposing in raw mode at around 1/250 @ f/4, ISO 200. f/4 is definitely the sharpest aperture on my macro lens. I use the camera in electronic shutter mode, for vibrationless, silent operation. I trip the shutter with the Panasonic Image App on my iPhone. So there is NO vibration. It's a mirrorless camera, with an electronic shutter, with a WiFi remote... and the table rests on heavily padded carpet.
One advantage of using Micro 4/3 for this rig is that 1:1 on a Micro 4/3 mirrorless is just 1/4 of a 35mm film frame! So if I want to crop part of a slide or negative, I just slide the camera closer (It's on a makeshift rail).
This was an easy design for me, because I spent 8 years making slides for multi-image slide shows. I had a Bowens Illumitran 3c, a commercial slide duplicator. I also had another rig consisting of an inverted 4x5 Beseler enlarger color head, a "slide compound" that had vernier controls that could move a slide in 1/1000" X,Y increments, and a specially modified Nikon F3 with a pin-registered back and precision viewfinder reticle (composition grid). With both rigs, I used a Bogen 60mm wide angle enlarger lens on a bellows, mounted on the Nikon. My assistant and I copied thousands of slides, and composed hundreds of complex images using multiple exposure techniques.
I built this rig out of an enlarger negative carri... (
show quote)
Thanks. Looks like quite the set-up. It has me thinking though.