I want to use my Hasselblad again. Yesterday I watched a friend (who lives 2700 miles from my home) use a Kaiser copy stand with a Nikon crop sensor sensor camera with a Dx 40mm micro Nikon F2.8 lens, on a B&W negative in a enlarger negative carrier that was enlarged to include the entire frame photograph a B&W negative. He reversed the image on Photoshop and worked on the image. I used C41 black and white Ilford XP-2 film. The resultant image was crystal clear.
I was wondering if this the correct pathway? I also thought that I can process silver B&W film myself and photograph the negatives.
is this the correct pathway?
Should I just mail the film and have it scanned.
I searched the web for copy stands. Kaiser stands and light boxes are beautiful however very costly. I was wondering if anyone has a copy stand for sale that can hold my Nikon D800 and lens. I was told by my friend that using an enlarger instead on a copy stand wouldn't work well due to the tilt of the enlarger column.
In short I want to convert a negative image to a digital file to work on for 2 1/4 square negatives.
Ideas would be greatly appreciated.
Ace
Thank you excellent references
I’ll second that! I use the predecessor, V500, and get excellent results. The scanner came with negative holders for 35mm film, 35mm slides, and 6x6 film.
Stan
I loved my Hassie 500c when I owned it. The size of the film can be an issue, as well as the tendency of the film to curl and not stay flat. The issue is keeping the entire film flat enough that everything is in the same 'focal plane'. Years ago, some people used a negative carrier with two sheets of glass to flatten the film. Helping to address the issue of flatness of field would require stopping down the enlarger/projection lens by about 50% to increase depth of focus. - And the glass that is used to flatten the film must remain spotless, free of dust.
A quality made photo enlarger should be a good source for holding and projecting the image to the camera. Some enlargers had tilting heads of up to 90 degrees for wall projection. The flatness of field of the illumination of the enlarger and a quality enlarger lens should work for you. Last, most people who shot with this kind of rig down onto the wood enlarger base, would use a 90 degree viewfinder on the prism of the camera - if the enlarger head could not be tilted 90 degrees for wall projection.
When other dinosaurs were still walking the Earth, I was the Beseler Product Manager and later ran the Omega (darkroom) Div. of Berkey Marketing. Getting an old enlarger is not terribly difficult, other than the cost of shipping. I have an old B66XL enlarger in the basement, but only an idea where the accessories for it might be located - so I'm not offering it as a solution for you.
There is no good reason not to use an enlarger for this purpose. It has been a long time, but I've done this for 6x6cm, 6x7cm and 4"x5" sheet film. An enlarger with a dichroic (3 filter) light source is a bonus in illumination intensity and ability to change the color temperature of the transmitted image.
I have hundreds of negatives, many of them were printed, but many were not.
Several years ago I bought an "Epson Perfection V700 Photo" scanner.
It scans the negatives very well, and I am very happy with it.
Just to test it, I took one of the scans to a photo lab and had it printed. Excellent result.
Same excellent result for scanning photos and other printed material.
This scanner was not cheap but I've never regretted paying the price for it.
Still have a few boxes of photos and a couple of albums to scan, so I can share them with my boys. There have already been questions from the daughters-in law who is going to get this album, and who that album...
When I'm finished scanning, they'll all get exactly the same photos!
Thank you, I was thinking of the using the enlarger only to hold the camera steady and photograph the image on a light box below the camera with the film being held in an enlarger negative carrier. Is this the best way in your estimation?
Thanks,
Ace
Thank you for your response. The method I was just taught was to place the negative in a negative holder modified from an enlarger- expanded opening to include the entire image, place it on a light box and photograph with a camera with a micro/macro lens mounted on a copy stand. Is this the preferred method in your view.
Ace
Forgot to add to my message above, about scanning my negatives:
Initially, the curling of the film was a problem, even when I used the filmholder that came with my scanner.
I went to a frame-shop and bought two pieces of non-glare glass, about 8x8 inches. I covered the four edges with packing tape, the kind that looks like silk threads have been woven into the tape - sorry, I don't know the correct name for this tape.
On two of the corners I left the tape about 2 inches longer than needed and simply folded that "tail" double, so no sticky stuff could grab on anything. I use these longer pieces to lower the glass on top of the negatives on the glass plate of the scanner and to pick it up again. Altogether is has saved me many hours, if not days of cleaning the glass piece to remove fingerprints.
robertneger wrote:
I was told by my friend that using an enlarger instead on a copy stand wouldn't work well due to the tilt of the enlarger column.
It can be done, but I wouldn't do it like this again. I'd use something more solid. The air conditioner in my house would cause some wavering of the image. One advantage, though, was that I could leave the lens focused at the same point and tweak the focus by moving the enlarger's board up and down by tiny amounts. (I didn't trust autofocus in this case.) My camera was tethered to a laptop, and this enabled me to control everything without touching the camera.
If you use a scanner, such as those suggested, you don't have to scan at super high resolution because of the size of the negatives. It would surely be easier than this.
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