Photos
Blossom in the garden. Nature’s beauty continues, oblivious to our anxiety. And it is a balm for it, too.
A quick history of technology lesson - now the girls understand why the return key is called the return key.
Highly socially distanced beach walk. Hoping the idiots who are carrying on as normal don’t take that from us as well.
Pleased with this one. The print is long gone - it was in display in a photo cube and was bleached out years ago. The negative was loose in my parents' junk drawer for decades, and was badly scratched up.
One scan, an hour’s work on retouching, and this is the result:
So. After supper Iris gets down, grumbling a bit. And then sits in the corner assiduously writing.
This is what she hands to me.
“I have just eetn (eaten) the yoyos and I am still hungree”.
4 years old and issuing her first letter of complaint.
I am so proud.
Scanning 126 and 110 format negatives with a Plustek OpticFilm scanner
I’ve been taking photographs for a long time. I was a photographer as a primary school child, using the cheap cameras of the 70s that my parents would buy me. And that means I have a lot of negatives from very long-gone formats. In particular, my earliest photos are on Instamatic film, of the 126 and 110 varieties. You can see examples of both below:
I’ve been progressively working my way through my much larger 35mm neg collection, but up until now, I’ve lacked a good way of scanning these older formats. I could scan the photo prints, but some of them are faded, and what’s the point of hanging onto these negs for decades if I’m not going to use them?
I did buy a cheap Veho scanner a couple of years ago that claimed to be able to do scan the negs, but the results were not good. I knew I could get better results from these negatives. I was contemplating sending them off for professional scanning, but the quality of the photos, in many cases, did not seem to justify the cost. Surely there must be a way I could use my existing film scanner?
Thankfully, when searching around the subject, I found a supplier of negative adapters for a variety of film scanner brands, including the Plustek OpticFilm model I use.
I put in an order, and waited impatiently for 10 day until they arrived. (They were shipped from the west coast of the US.) Here they are:
My scanning setup
I scan using VueScan software on my Mac. It is also available for Windows.
I put the scans into cloud storage, and then edit on my iPad Pro, using a mix of tools. I start with Pixelmator Photo for tweaking colour, levels and so on. I then clean up the dust and scratches using the healing brush in the iPad version of Adobe Photoshop. I used to do both stages in Pixelmator Photo, but I recently discovered that Photoshop’s healing tool works much faster, saving me significant amounts of time.
126 film scanning
Here’s some early results from the 126 film:
110 film scanning
And a first example of 110 film:
None of these are great photos. But they’re some of the only images I have from this period of my life, and so it’s great to have access to them digitally, at last.
