I’m finding that film photography ends up being very expensive per image, on the range of 50 cents per frame on 35mm and $1 for every medium format frame (still crunching the numbers a bit on this, but I hope to post an analysis soon). The actual film and developing is not the majority of this cost, surprisingly, especially for black and white film — if you process it at home. The main bottleneck is getting from the negatives to a published image, be that an image online, or 4×6 prints, or a framed photo on the wall.
As much as I like the purity of film, it is important for me to be able to use my images in a digital format, even if I take them on film. I know, I know, you are probably wondering why I’m bothering with film in the first place — that’s a debate for another day. But scanning costs, especially for medium format, quickly skyrocket. Again, 35mm scanning is readily available, often for $2-$3 more at the same place you get your film developed with 4×6 prints — simply because they just develop your film and then immediately scan it for printing digitally.
For example, the image above was processed at my local Costco. I ordered the scanned images on a CD and found that the scanned images were about 6 MP, or 3072×2048. This is approximately 2200 dpi. You can see from the 100% crop below that these scans are pretty clean, and the resolution is right around the resolution of the film grain. Not bad, right?
Granted, this is a 400 speed C41 process film, so it is not necessarily the most fine-grained film out there. But I suspect the only time you’d ever need more resolution than this is if you want to print 8×10s or larger. And for web use, you could get away with a lot less.
So, that got me thinking… why pay the extra $2 on each roll of 35mm film, or more appropriately, the $10-$20 that it takes to scan medium format film professionally, if I have a flatbed scanner right next to my computer? Wouldn’t it do a pretty good job of scanning film?
Well, apparently not:
Yes, this is the best I could do from my Canon MP470.
It boasts 2400×4800 dpi, which should be at least as good as a pro film scanner, right? Uh… no. The biggest problem, other than limited resolution (1200 dpi was the best I could get it to do), is tonal range. I had a really hard time getting it to scan film negatives, which look pretty dark compared to what the scanner is designed for (paper), and then inverting the image without losing the light colors.
Granted, I’ve heard that some of these flatbed scanners have attachments for film, but there’s got to be an easier, cheaper way. And, for the 120 film I’ll get out of my Yashicamat 124, it should be even easier to get a decent scan (i.e. 4MP or so).
So, I’m going to look into some DIY scanning techniques. I’ve already formulated a plan using my digital camera, a macro lens, a flash, and some diffusion, so I just need to try it out. I’ll keep you posted. FYI, some DIY scanning pages I’ve found are Photocritic’s Makeshift film scanner and DIY scanning solution at Photoforum similar to what I was thinking of. From what I can tell, the biggest challenge is getting color and dynamic range correct, especially with negative film. Heck, I might even need to worry about gamma adjustment!
Either way, I’ll keep you posted.
And, in other news, I got some 120 film for the Yashicamat today. I went ahead and got one of each chemistry: black and white negative, color negative (C-41), and color slide (E-6).