I just read a few reviews and now I need one.
See if you can get one of those adapters for the 1.5v batteries. That is what I use in the Rollei and the exposure was spot on. It sure beats using the wrong battery or those zinc-air cells.
It’s nifty. In case anyone else is intrigued, here’s a review. I put this wrist strap on it.
About the review:
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Yes, but it’s an oddball 43.5mm diameter by 0.5mm pitch.
I bought a step-up ring so that I could use a 46mm UV filter to protect the lens.
I have one voltage-converting adapters. I haven’t had a chance to test it out yet. I have several cameras that were designed for mercury batteries, and I was thinking of using it in the Yashica. I also found some old Wein cells, still in the blister pack. Like, probably 15 years old. I wonder if they’re still good?
Now that I’ve become enthused again about shooting on film, I really miss living in L.A.
back in the day, I used some incredibly old button cells I found stashed in my Dad’s stuff. Surprisingly, they worked to move that needle in my OM-1.
I can’t remember how long they lasted or if they even provided an accurate reading, I wasted tons of film regularly for all sorts of reasons.
“Film is cheap.” was the mantra of the time…
Update: I’ve ordered a Negative Supply copy stand, and a DigitaLIZA+ negative holder. I’ve also ordered a 60mm macro lens for my D3300 from a seller on eBay. So: Stand, negative holder (and light source, I think) and the lens. I think I’m good.
I’ve been watching @minor7flat5 's B&W processing video, but it’s getting late so I’ll resume watching it tomorrow.
I finally got the scans back from the roll of B&W I took in for developing six weeks ago. Four or five years ago I loaded a roll of Tri-X into my OM-4 and then never got around to shooting it. I finally exposed the expired film in mid-October.
I like this shot of an old Desoto, and this one of Bigfoot being dressed as Beetlejuice for Halloween.
I think I like the train in Drayton Harbor, the Desoto, and the railroad spike best.
Thanks for sharing!
Make sure you have a plan for how to get those gorgeous digital raw images of negatives into a more consumable format…that is, get your negative-to-positive conversion workflow ready to go, whatever that will be.
I do like the train in Drayton Harbor. I didn’t upload the other photo of Drayton Harbor. I really like the Desoto. I’m glad you like the railroad spike. I wanted to get a closer photo of it, but that was my last frame.
I think the station wagon on the lift behind the Desoto is a Plymouth Sport Subrurban, as was used in Lilies Of The Field. But I’m not sure.
I’ll get the digital scans first, and then get the processing program mentioned upthread (I’ll have to look for it, unless you can remind me) toget the positives. First thing though, learn how to develop the negs. 
Canon New F-1
To recap:
- I bought a ‘mint’ Canon New F-1 w/ Canon FD 28mm f/2.8 lens from a seller on eBay.
- The camera was loaded with ‘very old’ E-6 reversal film.
- Half of the film had been exposed, and I exposed the other half.
- The developed negative came back blank.
I don’t know if there’s a malfunction in the camera or lens, or if it’s something else. I was in the camera shop today, and the guy said there may have been a ‘loading error’. Ar? I noticed that when the aperture is adjusted, the aperture doesn’t open and close. When I use the stop-down button, it does. The stop-down button is for use with non-FD lenses, and I’ve never used stopped-down metering in 40 years of shooting 35mm. The New F-1 is a professional camera, and all of my other cameras (Nikon, Olympus) are professional-without-the-interchangeable-viewfinder. I don’t know if there is something wrong with the camera, or if I’m just doing it wrong.
Advice appreciated.
In other news: I bought a Canon FD 35-105mm f/3.5 macro zoom lens that would not fit on any of my Canons (New F-1, AE-1 Program, A-1, FTb). It turns out that there are two red dots on the lens that needs to be aligned – which they weren’t. When I picked up my B&W scans, a couple of guys at the camera store looked at the lens. One of them had tools, and aligned the dots. So the lens will now mount on the New F-1 anyway, and should mount on the others.
The aperture won’t close on the lens until the exposure is taken. That is what the stop-down button is for. But, the aperture blades could have oil on them, which will slow their closing, so that exposures are way blown-out, but the stop-down button still works, since you are holding it down for a long time.
If you mis-loaded the film, you would never reach the end, and you would not see the rewind knob move as you advanced the film (I don’t remember if it free-spins when the crank is closed, though).
I would open the camera and look thorough the lens as you take a couple of exposures - see if the lens is stopping down, and if the shutter is working correctly.
I was going to try this, with the back open.
That’s with those original FD lenses that have the metal ring at the base (called “breech lock” lenses). I believe it’s one of those things where you need to hit some magic button or lever with a dental pick to get it to go back to the normal position.
Glad you got yours sorted.
And yes, you will need to set the camera to Bulb and shoot a frame with the back open in order to see the aperture getting stopped down. It won’t do it until the moment you take the photo–the reason is pretty clear: you are using a through-the-lens camera, so if you set aperture to f/22 you would have a rough time composing and focusing your shot with the aperture actually stopped down.
Here’s a punch list for getting good photos using your scanning setup:
Shoot in raw. Set the aperture to f/8 or something nicely in the middle. You will probably have to turn a ring on your adapter to get the macro lens to stop down (if you used a manual macro lens).
Don’t worry about white balance. Set ISO to camera’s lowest natural ISO (probably 100). Set camera to live mode (mirror lock up). Set camera to use electronic shutter if that’s available. Use a cable release. (These last 3 were to minimize vibration).
Set up camera at right height to fill the frame with the negative as much as possible, with some border showing (you need the border). Enable focus peaking. Use focus peaking with zoomed in focus to really nail the focus (just twiddle the lens back and forth while screen is zoomed in until you see the most of the peaking color).
Now remove the film and shoot a blank frame of the light source, changing your shutter speed until the white photos are slightly blown out (some clipping in the histogram). That will give you the correct exposure once film is in the carrier.
Now start snapping your photos. Make life easier and don’t move the carrier or camera while doing the roll–this will make it easier to copy your crop from the first shot to all of the others.
Use a file naming convention to group photos from one roll together.
You will need two programs:
- Lightroom
- Negative Lab Pro (a plugin for Lightroom)
The first is pretty much universal for cataloging and making lightweight fully reversible edits (your originals are never modified). It would be a good investment regardless. Try the cheapest Adobe photographer’s monthly package and install Lightroom Classic so you can work with it for a month or two and decide if it’s for you.
I recommend using Lightroom if you have no other favorite, simply because it is the one everyone else uses and that means it is easy to get support and plugins for it.
I have a Nikon D3300 that I got for digital pics before I had an iPhone. Once I had the iPhone, I stopped using it – and even then, I’d only used it in the most basic mode. It’s been years since I clicked the shutter. So you punch list is completely unfamiliar to me. It still has the original, non-macro, lens that came with the kit. I do have a Nikkor AF 60mm f/2.8 Macro Micro Prime lens on its way, but it’s coming from Japan and DHL just received the shipping information today.
I’m guessing that’s just the basic mode?
Sounds like a reasonable aperture. I don’t know how or why to stop down the lens.
I never even considered it.
I assume that’s to prevent vibration. I think I have a cable release around here somewhere. I thought that digital cameras all had electronic shutters.
I don’t know what focus peaking is.
I assumed the camera would figure out the exposure.
I have a folder called 35mm. I it are folders for each brand of camera, with folders for B&W and Colour, and folders for each model of camera within the brand. So for example, the B&W photos that I shot on the Olympus OM-4 and just got back from the lab are in 35mm => Olympus => B&W => OM-4, and then the files are named for what they are (e.g., ‘Desoto’). I should put the image files into dated folders; e.g., ‘2024-10’.
I tend to go in fits and starts with my hobbies… and I have several. Is there something I can just buy, instead of paying a subscription month after month?
ETA: Even my ‘video’ cameras are 16mm film. Digital seems complicated.
Re: 35RC.
Looking through the files for me previous post, I opened the Colour folder for May of 2020 and found the photos I took then.
Three sample photos from the 35RC.
The first one is the beach where I live, the second one is a picture of my car in the lot of a pub where we met some friends. and the third one is a picture of my feet for some reason.
And let me add that it’s a good list!
No. Or at least unlikely. I’m not familiar with your camera, but most all consumer-oriented cameras come with all the selectable modes set to output JPEG images. For many reasons you absolutely one million percent do not want this. When a camera makes a JPEG out of its raw sensor data, it makes dozens of assumptions about what the scene you’re trying to shoot should look like. None of those assumptions ever include the thought that you’re shooting images of film negatives, so there’s a mark against you out of the box. Additionally, the camera will make an entirely different set of decisions for each frame you shoot, meaning that the adjustments and corrections you make to one shot probably won’t be right for the next. You’ll chase your tail, tear your hair out, rend your garments, beat your breast, all that. When you get an image wrong, you won’t know why. Worse, when you get one right you also won’t know why.
Your camera manual will have a section where it tells you how to set it to make RAW capture files.
I suspect the language tripped you up here. You want to shoot in manual mode. You select the shutter speed and the aperture. “Stopping down” means to set the aperture ring on the lens to f/8.
Shooting RAW obviates the need to worry about white balance.
Nope, most dSLRs still have physical shutters. Electronic shutters suck EXCEPT in a case like this where everything is fixed and no part of the subject is moving.
Still, investigate if your camera has mirror lock up mode. Shooting film right up close has very stringent requirements on motion reduction. Mirror slap on a 35mm format camera is not a worry for real-life shooting these days, but can introduce just a small amount of aggravating blur into a scan.
In video, they call it zebra striping. Your camera may have a mode that overlays red or yellow or some other noticeable color over the parts of the image that are in focus. The LCD displays on a dSLR aren’t sharp enough to really, REALLY see what’s in focus. The focus peaking mode is the digital version of the dude using a loupe on the ground glass of his 8x10 camera to absolutely NAIL the focus down to the millimeter.
No. You do not want the camera making exposure decisions here. See above. It will mess them up and maybe worse, make a different decision for each image. Letting the camera choose the exposure is fine for banging out snapshots and whatnot, but again, nowhere in the camera’s puny little brain are instructions on how to scan negatives. Per @minor7flat5, set the aperture to f/8, the ISO to as low as it will go, and use the histogram to choose a shutter speed such that you’re just clipping your highlights.
What you’re doing there is maximizing your dynamic range. In an ideal world, what I would have done back in my days as a prepress scanner operator is that you’d set your exposure to just clip on a totally clear piece of the negative, like the leader. For a B&W negative or a color positive, that would be your base fog, and for a color negative that would be orange mask+base fog.
I’m crossing that out. It’s true and maybe interesting to some, but more detail than needed here.
Adobe’s payment model sucks, but Lightroom is probably the best option for you as it’s got by far the largest amateur community, the best documentation, best or near best image quality and workflow, the most plugins, etc. The only viable alternative is the opensource Darktable, and it’s a good product, but the learning curve is steeeeeeep compared to Lightroom.
Literally everything you could ever imagine wanting to do in Lightroom is connected to a great demo video, often keyed directly into tutorials that have you doing the work alongside. Lightroom or no room.
Technically speaking, there are buy once, pay once alternatives like Capture One, but those are targeted towards pros and so 1. expensive and 2. you gotta be a pro to know how to use them.
@Johnny_L.A , don’t worry about a thing–you are on a journey and you’ll get there at your pace! Once a hobby becomes tedious work, then it’s time to switch to another hobby.
The list I provided was somewhat terse, and more of a “list of Googleable terms” than the exact instructions about how to do each. Thanks to @Pork_Rind for expanding on them.
But for many of them it will really come down to Googling how to do a specific thing with your specific camera. For example the focus peaking bit–look that one up for your camera model and you ought to find some good information on how to use it, and I’m sure you’ll find focus peaking to be a nifty feature when doing manual focus.
OK, so I’ll need to preset the camera to save the images as raw files and not JPEG.
Yes. I assumed that the aperture would be manually set. (I also assumed the shutter would work itself out.) ‘Stopping down’ made me think of the stop-down button so that you can see your depth of field.
Good.
‘Zebra striping’ is something I vaguely recall from 20 years ago when I was shooting part-time at a studio. My Aatons don’t have that.
I missed what the histogram is.
I’m not going to make prints. If I want prints, I’ll take the negatives to s studio. All I need is something to turn the negatives into positives. I have Photoshop Essentials, but I don’t know if it does that. (The only thing I know how to do in Photoshop is to add captions over images.)
That’s why I never got into digital photograph. It’s too fussy. With film, you set the ISO, focus, set your aperture and shutter (manual or AE), and press the button. There’s your ‘raw output’. The D3300 has 14 different modes on its dial, and I don’t know how many screens on the back. Once I get the camera set up for scanning, I doubt it will be used for anything else.
Gonna push back on this a little. First, I strongly recommend putting away any thoughts about Photoshop Essentials. Wrong tool for the job.
The workflow and tools @minor7flat5 talked about has nothing to do with making prints. You need a dedicated tool like Negative Lab Pro running as a plug-in inside Lightroom to invert your color negs (less so black and white but still the right tool would be better). Then once NLP has done its job, you still have color correction and retouching work to do. And that’s where Lightroom shines. Dusting images is a manual, tedious process, but you likely will be able to batch and automate most of your level adjustments and color tweaks, with only final refinement, cropping, and sharpening left at the end.
Bluntly speaking, in this process, you are taking on all of the roles and responsibilities of the scanner operator. If you stop after shooting and inverting the negatives, you’re likely to get flat, uninspiring images with lots of flaws.
Gonna push back on this too. The exposed, developed film is a starting point for a different process. Either by scanning for screen display, or printing on photo paper, someone, or someone+a computer made a bunch of decisions about filters, contrast, exposure, and local corrections that result in a final product.
As Ansel Adams said: “The negative is comparable to the composer’s score and the print to its performance. Each performance differs in subtle ways.”
Histogram…
The Nikkor AF 60mm f/2.8 Macro Micro Prime Lens came this afternoon. I took a close shot of the bridge of my reading glasses. It’s supposed to be a normal and macro lens, but I haven’t tried to see anything outside or across the room yet.
One curious thing is that my camera said I had to lock the aperture to the highest setting, and wouldn’t let me see an image until I did. Ar? I’ll have to look for the proper manual for the lens, and start reading the D3300 tome. (I noticed there are YouTube videos for the lens.)
The DigitalIZA came today too, but I haven’t looked at it yet.