I have a massive Bogen tripod taking up space in my room. It’s for my 16mm motion picture cameras. 
I have a few Bogen tripods for still cameras and super-8, but I don’t know if they’re in the house or the storage unit. (Could be both.)
Hm. You may have to find another option then for the software–I think NLP is only available as a plugin for Lightroom. Solve the software question first since without software you will be dead in the water.
Definitely use a cable release and live view + electronic shutter if that’s an option. That is, you don’t want a mirror slapping up and down, and if you can use the electronic shutter mode than do that as well, it will further reduce vibrations.
Oh, Lightroom is a program! I thought it was a room. What’s it used for?
Adobe Lightroom? Cataloging, curating, and light image cleanup / tweaking. I’m definitely not a fan of Photoshop, so I do everything in Lightroom–its tools are light-touch, like dodging and burning and spotting, and it doesn’t modify the underlying files.
What are you using for managing your digital image collection?
You know what I can do with Photoshop Essentials? I can put captions on pictures. That’s it. I took a photo of my iPhone yesterday so I could show you my ‘camera group’ (camera, light meter, and the new Massive Dev app) and wanted to draw a rectangular box around it. Couldn’t figure out how to do it. Looked online, and found instructions to click buttons I didn’t have.
I have folders. Like: 35mm => [camera brand] => B&W => [camera model] (or Colour => [camera model] => [folder w/date and film type] for film I’ve shot, had processed, and gotten digital copies for.
For digital photos, I just put them into iCloud or someplace.
Is there a reason nobody seems to like the copy adaptor solution? This simple thing:
Here’s an a example of it used to “scan” a Velvia slide (or maybe this was Provia 100F) on a Nikon D800:
It’s extremely simple, quick and easy to use. It doesn’t cost a lot. You just need a macro/micro lens and possibly an adaptor (depending on which Nikon lens you use) and an even light source (I just use flash.)
Mainly because I already have been using my current one for several months.
Valoi has a similar on-lens kind of thing, and had I seen those earlier, I would have tried them.
I was looking for something that could do 120 and 35mm and be fast. My time is worth spending a couple hundred more for.
With that said, I’d say to a newcomer to the area to give one of those cheap and cheerful devices a run. It sure beats spending hundreds of dollars and finding out they don’t like the process or the quality.
Don’t the negatives need to be mounted to use them?
Usually B&W negatives are cut into 6-frame strips.
Then, those can be slid into a viewer or scanner (or enlarger).
IMO, those are OK if you just need to do a few slides. The workflow falls apart if you have several rolls of film to scan. You still need a controlled light source, and buying one of those is 90% of the way to buying a either the product Johnny was looking at or the DigitalLIZA thing I posted, plus my device will let you scan 120 film, which is all I have anyway.
Lightroom is the gold standard of photo workflow management tools. There are others that are good (like the freeware Darktable) but none are as easy to use or as comprehensive. The new AI noise reduction tool in Lightroom as well as the AI object removal is just mindblowing to me when I think about how much time that work would have cost me in my pro days doing it manually in Photoshop.
My advice, let Lightroom do EVERYTHING, from the negative inversions to the color correction to the retouching and most importantly to the tagging and cataloging. Once you get around the idea of your photography career being a database and not a mess of files and folders, you will reach enlightenment.
Photoshop is a tool for working on an image. Lightroom is a tool for working on photography. Using Photoshop for the image workflow is like getting your CDL and renting a semi-truck to move a few boxes.
edit: sort of related: When scanning film with an digital camera, shoot in the RAW format. Don’t let the camera choose what parts of the image to throw away before you even get to take a peek.
I dug out my Bogen 3021/3063. 
Ok. I use that workflow vs my CoolScan because it it is a lot faster for me (the Cool Scan is like a minute a dram), and I get better resolution and great control shooting raw.
Sadly, there once was a better tool: Aperture.
Then Apple killed it.
I was all-in with Aperture with its (innovative at the time) non-destructive editing and great catalog management features.
These days I have no choice but to be all-in with Lightroom. I actually like it.
Unless I missed the magic Adobe “Transform your negatives” button (quite possible), it seems to me that the Negative Lab Pro plugin is still the way to go for conversion of negatives
.
Under the covers it is simply manipulating Lightroom’s sliders, but the UI provides a huge amount of help in doing this (e.g. providing sliders that know about film and translate your wishes to the underlying curves adjustments etc) as well as a serious leg up in managing the metadata. NLP makes things a lot more convenient for tracking “This was taken with a Canon A1 on Kodak Tri-X at 1/250 and f/16…but it was also taken with a Fujifilm X-Pro2 digital camera at 1/60 and f/8…and by the way the film was developed with HC-110 dilution B at home”.
To each their own. I used Aperture for two seasons and absolutely hated it, switching over to Lightroom. I didn’t like Apertures catalog system, though later they gave you more control over it, and I didn’t like the conversions as well as Adobe’s product.
Loved Aperture. Only quite begrudgingly moved over to Lightroom when Aperture died. I actually really like Capture One as well, but it’s really aimed more at the pro shooter and is priced accordingly. Or at least was. It seems to have come down some.
Biggest problem I have with Lightroom is the dichotomy between Lightroom Classic and Lightroom. I love the mobile-first philosophy of Lightroom - editing photos while sitting outside using my iPad and the Pencil is phenomenal. Nothing I like more than not sitting at my desk for extra hours a day. But Lightroom Classic has the most robust feature set for retouching and plugins. I know software engineering is a dark art, but I really think Adobe’s gotta get their shit together and unify the features.
I don’t think any Lightroom has a color negative inversion automation. NLP is the way to go there, although I’ve been using Negafix inside of the Silverfast scanning software because I already have it and like the results. Negafix has pre-built profiles for just about any film stock ever made and I like the results.
You can set up a curve with inverted RGB, but it’s clunky to use except for B and Ws, and even there, everything in your development settings is backwards, so to brighten a neg need to darken it in your controls. Something like NLP really is the best solution.
Just like flatbed scanning, this is a step in the process that works great for a handful of photos but starts to get old fast when you start converting whole rolls of film.
If I used a flatbed scanner and messed with curves, I could probably do a photo every 3 minutes at best. They would be all perfect, but at what cost.
With the digital camera + NLP method I can do a whole roll in a matter of minutes.
The best thing is, these photos serve as my digital proof sheets–they are good enough to share (see the color shot of the flower shop above) but the real strength is having them catalogued, and marked up with metadata, so I can go through my recent B&W rolls and decide which ones I want to print in the darkroom.
The color ones, not so much–I’m not ready to get into color darkroom prints!
I shot a roll of XT400 yesterday. It was a bright, sunny day so I set the aperture to 16 and the on-switch to Auto. Sure enough, when I looked through the viewfinder the needle was showing a shutter speed of 1/400 sec.
Sunny 16 for the win. It is sure encouraging when we can boldly go shoot without a meter and it all seems to work out. I haven’t done so in some time, but the feeling is a good one.
I took my AE-1 Program out all on its own today, intentionally leaving the A-1 back home. I went to Washington Crossing State Park–the place where Washington crossed the Delaware–and shot a roll of TMax 100.
I love shooting film! I spent so many years not really feeling like going shooting because digital made it so inconsequential, to me, and it never felt special. Nowadays I enjoy days like this.