Addict Posted December 1, 2015 Share Posted December 1, 2015 90% of my sales income since Y2K are from old scanned slides - maybe i better scan a lot more of my old slides rather than go out and shoot DSLR Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Chuck Nacke Posted December 1, 2015 Share Posted December 1, 2015 Get yourself a comfortable chair...... I've gone through four in the last decade..... Speaking of which, has anyone had good luck using a Bowens Illumitran with negatives? I picked up a perfect Illumitran 3 and have a D800 attached. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
spacecadet Posted December 1, 2015 Share Posted December 1, 2015 Just bought one myself, mostly for slides, tricky size-wise with the APS sensor but you're OK presumably with full-frame. I've had to cut down the flash a good deal with diffusion and NDs. For that reason (magnification range) it might be tricky getting enough stand-off for a medium-format neg. Pretty good with 35mm, but I haven't tried colour yet- I've read something about needing a filterpack for the orange mask. Using an enlarging lens I'm getting fair sharpness, not as sharp as a 400dpi scan but far quicker of course. The fascinating thing is finding out how bad your focusing and hand-holding was in those far-off days. With a bit of downsizing I might not even need archival privileges. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
John Mitchell Posted December 1, 2015 Share Posted December 1, 2015 On a sales-per-image basis, my scanned slides are still doing better than my digital images. I supposedly have about 3000 slides coming back to me this winter from an agency that is shutting down, so I had better take my scanner in for a tune up. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ed Rooney Posted December 1, 2015 Share Posted December 1, 2015 I can understand why Chuck (is that the original Chuck?) went to the trouble to scan a lot of his slides. He has important subject matter that he no longer has easy access to. And there are some special situations we all might want to preserve. The image below with the workers pouring bronze in Rome is one of mine. I have about two dozen scans on Alamy. A few have sold. Nothing recently. Most of my images shot in the film era, especial travel, are outdated. And I don't want to live in the past. I value my life and my past . . . but it's past. If I did want to scan more images, somewhere in the back room there is a Honeywell Repronar, a Nikon CoolScan, and some bellows gear. But right now I have no place to set any of it up. And I'd rather be out shooting. This is what I don't understand about your original statement, Addict: are you implying that scanned film produces better or more sellable images? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
John Mitchell Posted December 1, 2015 Share Posted December 1, 2015 I was shooting film until early 2007, so a lot of my travel slides are still sell-able. With my older slides, I look for "timeless" ones to scan. For instance, a picture of an ancient Mayan codex (painted book) that I shot during the 90's leased last month. Some subjects age better than others. Also, some places actually looked better "then" than they do now -- e.g. "restored" archaeological sites and historical buildings that were more authentic before they got prettified for the tourists. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Inchiquin Posted December 2, 2015 Share Posted December 2, 2015 Speaking of which, has anyone had good luckusing a Bowens Illumitran with negatives? I picked up a perfect Illumitran 3 and have a D800 attached. So far I've only used mine to scan 6x6 trannies from my old Bronica but I've been rather disappointed with the results - they lack both sharpness and contrast. However I've only done a few brief tests as yet because the 75mm Rodenstock that it came with won't cover the whole area of the slide so when I get some time to play with it properly I will need to replace the lens. Alan Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
spacecadet Posted December 2, 2015 Share Posted December 2, 2015 You may need a 90 or 105 then. Probably not your problem as it's a schoolboy error, but I struggled for a while but I had forgotten that you get focus shift when stopping down. Once I focussed at the shooting aperture things improved. There is, as I suggested, the awful possibility that our film images were never as sharp as we thought they were. It could just be me, of course, but it's a revelation that the whole concept of sharpness in the film and digital realms seems to be quite different. You just can't expect an Illumitran, or even a scan, to be as 'sharp' as a digital original. It has other qualities. That said, downsizing to the Alamy minimum is quite promising. Ed, I'm sure a good deal of your 'dated' stuff is of interest as archive. Mine is just old snaps. Mostly. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mickfly Posted December 2, 2015 Share Posted December 2, 2015 I should think the big sellers would be the old black and white industrial or urban pictures from the likes of Peter Davis, definitely worth scanning and uploading, although in Davids case I think his better revenue is from high quality prints. My urban pictures from the late 1970's and early 1980's ended up being lost apart from one small box of negs and prints, and, although not on a par with Davids, I might just scan a few for upload (would I need archive permissions?) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
spacecadet Posted December 2, 2015 Share Posted December 2, 2015 , I might just scan a few for upload (would I need archive permissions?) Unless you reckon Tri-X would pass QC at the equivalent of 30x40, preferably! You need archive access to bypass QC. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
John Mitchell Posted December 2, 2015 Share Posted December 2, 2015 , I might just scan a few for upload (would I need archive permissions?) Unless you reckon Tri-X would pass QC at the equivalent of 30x40, preferably! You need archive access to bypass QC. The archival route would be the way to go. It's relatively easy to get permission. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mickfly Posted December 2, 2015 Share Posted December 2, 2015 , I might just scan a few for upload (would I need archive permissions?) Unless you reckon Tri-X would pass QC at the equivalent of 30x40, preferably! You need archive access to bypass QC. Shot mostly FP4 and HP5 (if I remember rightly), but the few that survived are not the cleanest negs around. Might have al ook at archive route, thanks Mark/John. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Chuck Nacke Posted December 2, 2015 Share Posted December 2, 2015 The reason I asked about the Illumitran and copying negatives is not for stock. I am looking at shooting film (not chromes) and duping it with one of my D800's B & W is easy to process. Color neg is not difficult, but I don't want to set up to run E-6. I'm doing a lot of commissioned work and was interested in seeing if this could produce more interesting images? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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