Lea asks: > I have borrowed a scanner from a friend. A Nikon Coolscan V ED. > > It seems to be doing a lovely job but is quite slow. I'm doing 35mm > negs. > > Do I recall correctly that some on this lis have used a lightbox and > macro lens to 'scan' negs?.. it share tips and tricks for getting > the best images? > > I'd like to do several hundred negatives over the course of a year or > so. Most if not all will be in black and white. scanning colour negs might be easier (much) with the film scanner allbeit slow, but as others have said - use vuescan for best results either way. shooting B&W with a camera in RAW will be a lot faster than scanning and you can import the results into Vuescan for flipping and adjusting before exporting. No point bothering about scanner FARE, ICE or other IR dust removal techniques, they don't work with silver based emulsions anyway. Use a flat field lens - a repro lens is better than an enlarging lens which is better than a macro lens generally speaking, but take the time to find the sharpest aperture!* No really, it'll make a world of difference. A lot of repro lenses are actually fixed at a single aperture - their sharpest, for good reason. if you don't have a good one, high quality repro and enlarger lenses are cheap on ebay. If you have EL lenses at home, try each of them until you find the sharpest! Use tint free acrylic sheet, or if you can't find that lay your slided on a sheet of glass above a sheet of out of focus paper and illuminate from below making sure the illumination is really even. White light LEDs or a flash are both good but do a manual colour balance either way and set ezposure manually. As Steve said, copy from the emulsion side and *clean your negs* before shooting. This is easily done in a dimly lit room by lighting the film with a bright, specular, angled light source and flicking the dust off gently with a spotting brush rather than just wiping the film and hoping you get everything. Once you've set everything up it's a pretty quick process, spot neg, lay down, shoot, repeat. much quicker than scanning. * sharpest apeerture If you still have access to a darkroom rack the enlarger up as far as it'll go, pop the neg in the carrier and slip a grain magnifier under the lens then click through the stops - you'll see at which aperture the grain is sharpest! It's a bit harder comparing lens to lens but you may just find some lenses stand out (good or bad) right away. I found a fujinon EL 50mm which exhibits the same degree of sharpness at both 5.6 and 8 (!) and it was clearly superior to my schneiders and rodenstocks much to my surprise at the time. the Minoltas and Nikkors were all pretty soft and got sold long ago - though I have a Wollensack which fair sparkles ! I also have a flat field 'macro' russian Industar 50:3.5 whcih gives the enlarging lenses a run for their money and soundly thumped the Canon macro lenses I once owned (they got sold while they were still worth something :) but Do take the time to find the sharpest aperture and adjust the light levels/speed to compensate karl
