This past Christmas, my siblings gifted me a gently-used Nikkor 55mm f/3.5 AI Micro lens. I have been wanting to fool around with a macro lens for awhile, but especially for the purpose of developing old negatives. I visited Costa Rica in 1997 and Germany in 1999, back before I'd even thought about digital capture, and while I doubt I got much in the way of good pictures, digitizing the film seems like a fun project.
My parents also have some old slides (what a trip through the way-back machine that's been!) that I figured I could digitize as well. My father was a photographer in his own right back in the day, and he lent me his lightbox to play around with. I have to see if I can get his old bellows to work with the lens (that would be a minor coup), but if so, I should be able to make some pretty solid prints.
My experience with Walmart's digital scans is pretty poor. They have a nice Fuji process for printing (which I prefer to Kodak's), but their scans are barely 1.5 megapixels and lack any sort of quality. While I can and have doctored the images in the Gimp, it's really not nearly as good as you can produce with a suitable negative development workflow.
