DVPhoto

Now I didn’t get back into film photography just so I could scan the negatives and then print the image just like any digital photo. I figure if the image is good enough to put up onto the web, you may as well spend a bit of effort in the darkroom and make a print yourself. At least then I can scan in the final result and keep the post processing to a minimum. At least this is the reasoning that I’ve used to keep myself from blowing my cash on a film scanner.

Of course given that I don’t even have a fully functional dark room right now, this means that I don’t get to post anything unless I get the images scanned in at the 1 hour photo place when they are developed (which wont work with my B&W stuff since I am developing that myself). This costs money, and the results aren’t exactly something to write home about. So I thought, why not use my DSLR, I have flashes and I have close up filters. A proper macro lens would be nice, but with the close up filters I could get the lens close enough to fill most of the image with a single 35mm frame. Here is a brief run-down of the experiment.

I took a Tupperware container that I placed upside down over some white cardboard, placing my flash to the right pointing directly to the side of the container. This would provide a relatively diffuse light source.

At first I placed the film on a piece of paper on top of this container, but the fibres of the paper were immediately obvious in the resulting photos. So I scrapped the paper idea, and put two piles of books on either side of the Tupperware, putting the film on top of these, held down with some light objects that I hoped wouldn’t damage the surrounding frames (in this case a CD and my lens cap). This kept the plane of focus far enough away from the container below so that none of its surface texture could be seen.

I took a few shots at various apertures until I had some options to work with in Photoshop. These were shot in RAW as I would need the added bit depth.

It took a bit of playing around in PS to get things right. Just converting the negative image and then inverting it results in terrible results, the colours were off, the contrast almost non existent. So how do we get a better image?

The first thing to do is make sure that the white balance is set correctly. The problem with colour negatives, is that they have a very strong orange colour cast. So the first thing you do is take the white point selection tool in RAW converter, and select the blank film around the picture. This is the white of the negative image.

Now select the highlights option (this will show the blown highlights as red) and increase the exposure until you have as much of the film around the picture red without any of the picture itself over exposed. Reduce brightness to 0, and increase the shadow slider until the negative image looks about right. This will take practice, but after a few tries you will get a feeling for it. Now you can open the converted RAW file in PS.

Once you have your negative image in PC, go to the Image->Adjustments menu and select Invert. This will turn the image in to a positive image. The resulting image should be pretty close to what you want. I found simply using Photoshop’s auto color option did the final touches to the image to make it decent. In no way do I think you’re going to get a quality image that you could print from out of this, but the result is definitely okay for posting your holiday snaps for your friends to view. Improving the lighting consistency across the frame, and a true macro lens might result in images worth of enlargements and art prints, but I don’t have the time or the desire to test that right now.

The image I used for this test was from a batch that I had gotten processed and scanned in at one of our local 1 hour labs. The resulting scan from that lab was horribly saturated and sharpened so much that there was no chance of getting any decent enlargements out of it. Given that it doubled the cost of processing the film, I just don’t feel it was worth it. The canon shot that I did with this quick setup had much more faithful colours, and due to less sharpening had way fewer artefacts in the image. With a proper macro lens I would have been able to achieve close to the camera’s full 8 megapixels, and even with just my close up filters, I was able to achieve an increase in size over the 2.2 megapixel scans. The thumbnails below link to web sized versions of the photo, as well a 100% crop comparison.

Fuji Scan

Canon Photo

100% Crops

• flash guide number@Everything2.com

Photocritic have a very interesting post titled “What do you do when they nick your photos?”

It’s a reality we all have to deal with when posting our photos online. Obviously the vast majority of us aren’t quite so popular/good that it becomes a huge problem. Yet even as a average photographer, you probably have a few great photos; imagine how you’d feel if someone else made a profit off those at your expense. Or worse; when you complained, you were the one who got censored?

Apart from the obvious “never put your photos online”, how do you stop someone using your images for their own gain. For me the most obvious is don’t give others access to the large resolution photos. Sure they can still steal your 600 pixel wide photos, but they won’t be able to use them for much. Other options include putting a water mark on the image, but the more effective the watermark (i.e. how much of the image it covers), the more it destroys the photos beauty.

Some people might think that proposed new laws might do the trick; but I think these laws miss the point and are more targeted at trying to put kids and their parents into jail. A teenager using your photo as a wall paper for his desktop is not the problem. Companies stealing your photos for profit is the problem, and the laws currently cover that just fine, though they could perhaps benefit from some changes making it easier for an individual to pursue a large company.

I personally use a Creative Commons license for most of my images. I also try to make sure no one can download full resolution versions. And I dread the day I find someone selling my work without my permission. I dread it because it will take effort and money to make them pay, but I sure as hell will do everything in my power to bring them to justice.

Amazon.com acquires dpreview.com

Phil: Today marks an exciting milestone in the history of dpreview.com, everyone here is very much looking forward to being able to do more with Amazon’s help. We’re aiming to expand our product coverage and deliver new site features for our readers and our daily community.

Congratulations to the DPReview team. DPReview was by far the largest set of reviews online (and a regular read for me); I hope with the new corporate support you will be able to review even more cameras.

Starting June 4th, Strobist will be starting a new free lighting course: Lighting 102. This looks like it is going to be an interesting course, where you get to compare your work with hundreds of others on Flickr. Hopefully once you have done all the assignments, you will have gained an in depth knowledge of lighting on a budget.

I’ll be giving this a go, though time constraints may be a problem. That is fine though, as they are not too strict on attendance.

You’ve seen them, you’ve even read a few tutorials, perhaps you even managed to get one or two HDR images looking about right. Well if you wanted a little more help, Tutorial blog has extensive list of HDR tutorials.

HDR Tutorials Roundup

I remember JPG magazine starting up as print on demand zine shortly after I got my first DSLR. They’ve come a long way since then, eventually moving from POD, at lulu.com, which couldn’t afford to pay the photographers they featured; to a full blown magazine, paying their photographers, and developing a huge fanbase.

Well I decided to enter one of this months theme’s, “You Ready to Rock”, and figured I’d get in some shameless self promotion.

Well for the last few weeks I have been reading photographyvoter.com every day for my photography news. It’s a great site, and I hope it will grow. To grow though, everyone needs to submit links; and I currently find submitting links to it to be slow, having to load up the site separately, copy paste the link to the submit page, etc. I’m lazy, so I often end up not submitting.

To fix this, I decided to modify my bookmarks toolbar word press “Press It” code to work with Photography Voter. Now when you are reading an article that you like, just click the VoteIt button, and you will be taken to the submissions page, with url and title already filled in. I have no idea if this has been already done by someone else, but I couldn’t find it on google, so I figured I’d share.

Drag this PhotographyVoteIt link to your toobar to use it. I’ve tested it in Firefox 2, and IE 7. It should work on other browsers that have a bookmark toolbar, but if it doesn’t feel free to modify.

JMG-Galleries has a nice list of some blogs about photography. It contains a lot of blogs you may never have read before, so worth checking out.

I read about this a while back on Strobist. The infamous ebay remotes are great value for money, but one of their biggest drawbacks is range.

This tutorial provides step by step instructions to adding an external antenna to the ebay remote (v1 I believe, hopefully the v2 version is similar enough). Apparently increasing the line of site by an order of magnitude, this is definitely a simple modification that is well worth the effort.