Aperture Users Network

In the last part of this short series of articles I wrote about how you can easily use a program like FileMaker’s Bento to catalog your film archive. My intention was to create a library of each piece of film and, using a proper storage technique, be able to retrieve the film when necessary without too much trouble.

One very important piece of this puzzle is going to be the digitizing of the film. The point here is not necessarily to make a permanent working copy of each frame you have ever shot, but to make a “reference” image that you can use to help give your memory a clue as to what the images are all about.

For my collection of film there is just too much to scan at high res. It would take forever to get it all finished, and the storage requirements would be very large. So, I like to think of this process as making contact sheets for my database.

In Bento, I have created a new Library called Contacts. This is going to basically mimic what I have in Aperture, but it will allow me to drop in low res images into my Image Library in Bento with ease.

But, lets get back to the database part in a minute. The more important question I have right now is, “how am I going to physically digitize all this stuff?”

There are a number of methods I could try, between scanning things myself or outsourcing the work to a lab, so lets try and think of what the basic requirements are here.

In the end, I want a medium to low res scan of each frame in my archive. I need to be able to do this quickly, and as there is a good deal of work, it has to be cost effective. Obviously the $5 per image scans they offer at my local lab will be too expensive. I could invest in a scanner of my own, but that would also cost a bit, and I’m not so sure the speed of the whole process would be very reasonable.

In the end I was inspired by an article over at John Harrington’s excellent blog called “Photo Business News and Forum.” He outlines his method for digitizing film using a high end digital SLR and some other neat tricks.

Basically, I took John’s idea and dumbed it down to a very DIY, low budget setup. So far it seems to work just fine, and gives me the results I need. I will probably modify it as I go, but here is the current design.

First of all, I need a camera and a lens. The lens is basically going to drive this system so I looked around for a decent macro lens that will reproduce at 1:1. The funny thing about digital camera’s these days is that with their APS sized sensors, the 1:1 ratio that the lens can produce is overkill!

So I found a Nikon 60mm Macro lens, and an old Nikon D100. The D100 was one of my favorite digital SLRs (and in fact the first I ever owned). It produces a respectable 6mpix image, and creates an NEF raw file fast enough for this project.

The downside to using this camera will be that I can’t do a tethered setup with my laptop, but this isn’t a huge concern. The truth is, that I tried downloading Nikon’s Camera Control Pro software to get this working in a tethered setup but I couldn’t get it to recognize my camera. In the end I figured it was just another piece of the puzzle I could do without.

If one day I buy myself a Canon macro lens, I will be able to easily set this up for tethered shooting directly into Aperture.

Now that I have my camera and lens, I will need some type of light source and copy stand. For a light source I chose a small and very bright light table. It’s about 6”x9”, so it’s big enough to handle all of my film types. I mounted my camera on a tripod and set it up so that the plane of the camera sensor was in line with the plane of the light table. I basically eyeballed this, and hoped I got it right.

A better solution would be to use a real copy stand, and a bubble level. This would ensure that my film and sensor were exactly in line every time.

Once I had my camera and light table in set up I placed a piece of 120 film on the table. I positioned the camera so that the negative filled the frame and noted the meter’s auto exposure. I then adjusted the meter for a similar exposure with a much smaller aperture. When you are working at such close distances, you really need all the depth of field you can get in order to produce an acceptable result.

Now for the fun part. I took a few frames, bracketing my exposure, and then moved the film to the next image. I did this for the entire roll, making sure to under and over expose each frame.

The process took less than 10 minutes for the 12 exposure roll of 120 film. I figure that once I have the exposure down, I can probably move this along even faster. It’s really a matter of getting things set up and getting the moves down.

After I shot the roll and returned the negatives to their storage container, I loaded the images into Aperture. This is where I hit my first roadblock. Aperture has no way to invert an image. This makes sense as there are very few times a digital photographer would have to do this, but it does seem like a very simple tool that Apple could add in for a future version.

No matter, I just selected the images that looked like the closest exposures and clicked “Edit With External Editor.” This sent the image to Photoshop where I did a quick Invert (to change from a negative to a positive). I also set my black point by selecting the film edge, and then clicked Close to save and send them back to Aperture.

Back in Aperture I now have a nice looking set of positive images, stacked with their negative counterparts. I made an album called “Positives” and made the positives the album pick. You can easily do this in Aperture by selecting the images you want to be the Album Pick and then clicking “New Album From Selection.” This creates an album which you can stack to show the Album Picks.

Over in Bento I am now able to grab each of these positives form my Aperture library to use as reference slides for the database. My Bento library is really coming along and already proving useful. I used it just the other day to take inventory of what film I had processed and what I hadn’t, helping me realize there was a lost roll somewhere in my luggage!

The D100 images of my film are perfectly good for this purpose and in fact just fine for sharing on flickr.com or elsewhere on the web. I even made a few 5” prints on my little HP 620, and they looked great! Perfect for the fridge or my desk.

I really love this combination of analog and digital photography. Shooting with the Holga is a ton of fun if you can quickly get it all into your computer. If you would like to check out a few of my Holga frames from this project, feel free to stop over at my flickr page by clicking here. The color frames were all from one roll of film. There was one frame that was just too dark to show, but otherwise, not too bad for having no control over the exposure, and little over focus! I played around with the white balance a little, but didn’t do much else. Remember the point of these is not to produce a final image, but to create the equivalent of a contact print. So far it’s working for me!