Railfan Technology > Learning to Scan Emil's 35mm, Update

Possibly the greatest challenge in scanning these 35mm negatives by Emil Albrecht has been the tight curl they all have from being stored tightly rolled for many decades.

Following a suggestion from Don Wirth (Frisco1522), I have finally gotten around to buying some 35mm slide mounts. I bought Gepe 7011 glassless plastic slide mounts. They come in two halves that snap together, and include a metal mask to flatten the film, along with slots in each mask that holds the film in place. The Gepe slide mounts hold these curled negatives tight and flat. Amazon sells the Gepe 7011 slide mounts in boxes of 100 for $29.50. The attached photo is made from a couple screen captures from the Gepe web site, showing their 7011-series slide mounts.

Having to cut the negatives into single images, and mounting them in slide mounts is time consuming, so I only do it for the worst ones that refuse to lay flat enough in the Epson film holder for 35mm strip film. I then scan the single images as a slide using the Epson slide holder. I fiddled with the focus slide bars on the Epson holders, and found the right setting for my scanner, providing the best focus; there are five settings and I use one notch higher than the factory setting. Further tests show that the focus on the Epson film holders is actually better than even direct scanning of the negatives on the scanner glass, either with emulsion up or emulsion down. I even tried wet scanning, which produced acceptable images, but the process is amazingly labor intensive and very messy, and very difficult with curled film. Actually, scanning these tightly curled negatives using the Epson film holders that come with the V850, either as strips or as single images in slide mounts has produced the best scans. Also, scanning at 16 bits and 3200 ppi also really helps. With another 80+ rolls to do, it's time to get serious.

Don Strack



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/30/19 05:40 by donstrack.

---

---

---

Jackpot!

Now, can you make it color? (Just kidding. This lily is already gilded :-) )

John.

That old curled film is like blue spring steel.  Print looks great.  I had to spend a lot of time cleaning up my prints because everytime someone unrolled the strip to see what was on it, it would snap closed and film had a lot of scratches on it.  You couldn't keep it unwound long enough to get it into the neg holder (darkroom print) or the Epson holder.  It would pop it back open.
I've never tried fluid scanning.  Sounds like a PIA.
I'm glad I got the slide mounts!

Well worth the trouble.
Bob

Looks good. Its great that some of us are willing to do this type of work on some of these older collections so that some really interesting images can be seen. In most cases of B&W neg collections very small percentage were ever printed. Scanning means that many more can be seen.

RWJ

LV95032 Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Looks good. Its great that some of us are willing
> to do this type of work on some of these older
> collections so that some really interesting images
> can be seen. In most cases of B&W neg collections
> very small percentage were ever printed. Scanning
> means that many more can be seen.
>
> RWJ

So true. There is a lot of info in that latent image that cannot be easily printed as a complete image without a lot of burning and dodging. A good scanner and digi editor (ie: 16 or 32 bits) will be able to much more easily pull out the great tonal ranges in the B&W images. 35 mm cameras back in the day would often sport really decent lenses, which resulted in good images that were seldom ever tapped. Don's image of that 4-8-2 proves it.

John.