Developing Negatives Digitally

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.

Black and White Treatment

I've spent some portions of my time shooting limiting myself to black and white for sake of the effects.  One of the images from Getty really worked out well for a bit of levels enhancement and a black and white treatment:

Before

The image is low-contrast and relatively blurry in the original form—manually focusing at 400mm is tough given how thin the depth of field is.  The birds on the posts are generally sharp, and the ones flying aren't.

The levels enhancement helps the contrast some, but it makes the image a little over done.  Fortunately, a black and white treatment really helps:

After

All in all, I think it's quite an improvement—and the print of the black and white version was pretty terrific.  One of my recent favorites, to be sure.

Compositionally it could probably be better (the dark spot in the upper left is a small overhang from a tree a few feet away), but it does handle rule of thirds fairly nicely I suppose.  The blurriness of the image is actually somewhat attractive here, as it helps to distinguish the middle third from the bottom one.  I'm undecided about whether the top third is compositionally useful or not—if not, a crop might serve better to fill things more adequately.

Gettysburg

Shooting with the 400 f/5.6.

Took a trip to Gettysburg with friends this past weekend and really enjoyed a good shoot.  The weather wasn't too good, and my inexperience with shooting film really showed, as I was unable to overcome some minor issues with the film feeder and probably lost two and a half rolls of film on the day.

My favorite shot that I took was from inside of a church at a Lutheran seminary there:

85mm f/1.8 @ f/2, 1/100s, ISO 1600

The inside of the church was pretty dark but afforded some interesting views through the stained glass.  I'd like to do some distortion correction, but I liked this one also:

24mm f/2.8 @ f/2.8, 1/60s, ISO 800

The 400 did not see as much action, but I did take a few shots on the way to Spangler House:

400mm f/5.6 @ f/5.6, 1/3200s, ISO 1000

400mm f/5.6 @ f/5.6, 1/800s, ISO 1000

400mm f/5.6 @ 5.6, 1/1250s, ISO 1000

All in all, a fun trip with good company.  Hopefully there will be more.  Two trips a year is not enough!