Railfan Technology > Digitizing 35mm Negatives with a DSLR

From 1994 to 2006, before I switched completely to digital, I almost exclusively shot color negative film (1100+ rolls). Lots of good stuff in those frames, but plenty of "junk" too. My crystal ball kept adding years to the time it would take to digitize everything, even the good stuff. Being impressed with how digitizing slides with a DSLR and projector turned out, I knew there had to be a way to shuffle 35mm negative frames past the camera lens too. The following webpage shows my gravity fed contraption, er, solution, to more efficiently digitize 35mm negatives using a DSLR. Maybe fodder for someone else looking to start a project. Its definitely adjusted my multi-year time frame down to months as I've digitized 300 rolls over the last 3 weeks.
http://www.yardoffice.com/archives/howto/filmshootingdslr.html

1. Unprocessed photo captured by the camera.
2. Processed photo.
3. 1:1 crop

Jeff Eggert



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/21/19 17:18 by blueflag.

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Thanks for pix & vid on your digitizing setup. Do you release the camera shutter with your left hand?

That's pretty creative!

Steve Sloan

Thanks for the comments.

Yes, in this case I use my left hand for the shutter via a wired remote. This is mostly due to needing to adjust the precise negative position once in a while and it is more ergonomic using the left due to the right controlling the advance lever.

Jeff Eggert

I'm probably missing something because its late and I'm tired from working 10 hours.  That said, what's the advantage to the vertically-mounted counterweights?  Why not just slide the negative holder manually?

pennsy3750 Wrote:
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> I'm probably missing something because its late
> and I'm tired from working 10 hours.  That said,
> what's the advantage to the vertically-mounted
> counterweights?  Why not just slide the negative
> holder manually?

I wanted something semi-automated and enjoy building gadgets, so why not I guess.  Ideally a motor would drive the advance, but I'm not an electronics guru.

Another reason to not manually advance is ergonomics and arm fatigue.  An example, on a previous light copy table setup I made, the shutter was up higher than the table height.  That was very difficult to do for a long time - easy solution there is a remote such as used here.

Jeff Eggert