36 29 June 2019 I http://www.amateurphotographer.co.uk I subscribe 0330 333 1113John
Wade
Regular AP
contributor John is
a freelance writer,
photographer and
author. His latest
book, Retro Cameras, includes many
pictures scanned from negatives and
transparencies from the film era.
Find John at http://www.johnwade.org.ALL PICTURES © JOHN WADE
Technique DIGITISING YOUR NEGATIVES
I
f your interest in photography was
born and bred in the digital age
you probably have all your pictures
saved in folders on your hard disc or
in the Cloud. But if you are a photographer
of a certain age, it’s likely that somewhere
in drawers and lurking in boxes at the
backs of wardrobes you’ll have piles ofNew life
for old negs
Joh n Wa de shares his best techniques for turning
fi lm negatives into superb digital images
negatives and perhaps transparencies
from the past, languishing and forgotten.
So now’s the time to dig out those old
negatives and transparencies and turn
them into digital images, which you can
adjust, improve upon and manipulate in
the way you already take for granted with
images from your digital camera.But why digitise the negatives? Wouldn’t
it be better to scan the prints that resulted
from them? Not necessarily. A print,
especially if commercially produced by a
budget-priced high street photo lab, might
not do full justice to the negative, and if
you scan a mediocre print all you’ll get is a
mediocre digital image. Think rather of a
fi lm negative as being like the analogue
equivalent of a raw image. All the
information is there; you just need a
way of bringing it out. An over-exposed
negative, for example, will be overly dense
and might originally have yielded a poor
print. But that dense negative will still
contain details that can be digitised,
manipulated and turned into a
positive image – and it’s likely to
be better than a print from the
same negative all those years ago.
The same goes for an under-
exposed transparency.
There are three types of fi lm
images to digitise: monochrome
negatives, originally intended to
make black & white prints; colour
negatives, originally used to make
colour prints; and transparencies
which are direct positive images
made on the actual fi lm that
passed through the camera.Shown on a lightbox, what to scan:
35mm monochrome negatives,
35mm colour negatives, 35mm and
medium-format transparenciesScanning old negatives can bring the past to
life. The negative of this picture was found in
a vintage camera, then photographed on a
lightbox and inverted to make a positive image