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Scanning negatives with a camera

When I developed my first roll at home last month, I still took the negatives to the lab to be scanned. It felt slightly silly. I had done the difficult part at my own kitchen table and then paid someone else for the part that is basically taking a photograph. So since the start of the month the kitchen table has been a scanning station, and I have been eating on the sofa.

The camera is my old Olympus OM-D E-M10, the first one, from before they started adding Mark numbers. It has been in a drawer since the Bessa arrived in 2021. The battery still had some charge, which surprised me. The lens is new to me: an M.Zuiko 60mm f/2.8 Macro, bought second-hand on Tori from a man who had used it to photograph his stamps.

The light is an A4 tracing pad, the kind sold for drawing. For black and white film the quality of the light matters much less than it would for colour. This one was cheap, and so far it seems even enough.

Without a tripod, the setup is sideways. The pad stands upright against the wall, held by the bread bin. The camera lies on a stack of books facing it, mostly volumes of an old encyclopedia and whatever else was the right height. Getting the camera square to the pad took most of the first evening. If it is even slightly off, one side of the frame goes soft, and with books the only fine adjustment is a folded receipt under one corner.

Flatness was the next problem. Negatives dried in my bathroom curl more than the lab's ever did. I cut a mask from black mount board with a window a little larger than one frame and taped it to the pad along one edge. The strip slides in behind the card, which presses it more or less flat. Before scanning, the sleeved strips now spend a few days under the Finnish-English dictionary, which is the heaviest book I own.

For my own reference, since I will forget:

The inverting happens in darktable, in a module called negadoctor. You tell it the film is black and white, point a picker at the clear film between two frames so it knows what the bare film base looks like, and then move sliders named after darkroom things: paper black, paper grade, print exposure. I have never made a print in my life, so I move them by feel. When one frame looks right I copy the settings to the rest of the strip. The first frame that came out properly was the tram stop at Hakaniemi in the rain. Rodinal does not hide the grain of HP5, and at full size it looks like wet gravel.

Then there is dust. A speck on the negative blocks the light, so after inverting it becomes a small white dot, and there are always more of them than I saw on the pad. My bathroom, I now know, has a great deal of dust. I run the hot shower for a few minutes before hanging film to dry, which is supposed to settle it. I cannot tell if it works. The rest I paint out with the retouch module, one dot at a time, which is fine with the radio on and miserable after the tenth frame or so. One frame from last week has a long fibre across the sky. I suspect the bath towel.

Proper film holders exist, and copy stands. I looked at them and closed the tabs. The scans are about as good as the lab's. A few are worse, and those are mostly the ones I rushed.

There are also four years of lab negatives in a shoebox in the hallway. Some of the lab scans were cropped tighter than the negative, so those will probably be the first ones I redo.

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