24th August
Prior to lockdown I had discovered an old film camera that had been gifted to me, Cleaned it up and took it to the photo warehouse to learn how to use it. After getting a new film, a new battery and learning how to load the coloured film I began to take photos in town. The images related to my ideas are pretty similar to what I am doing now however the execution is a little different. I decided to continue with the film as I had already taken the images.
After taking 2 rolls of coloured film I got them developed into negatives. However, the USB stick that the digital coloured images were loaded onto failed the day we went into lockdown. So I had to figure out a way of scanning these images and deciding whether I was going to learn how to colour them as well or change my idea.
First I tried using a window. Carefully taping the negative to a blank white piece of paper, then taping that piece of paper to a window and using my camera to focus on the negative. This failed for many reasons EG: all my windows are high up and in a difficult place so I had nothing to balance my camera on, the camera couldn’t focus, the light from behind wasn’t bright enough overall the image wasn’t in focus and was extremely difficult to execute.
My next attempt was scanning with a printer. It worked well, had a lot of detail but not enough to where I was satisfied.
After that, I turned to good old youtube and tried it a different way. I downloaded a blank white image, zoomed in on it so it went all the way to the edges, laid the negative over top to the screen and tried to take a photo with my camera. However, that failed because it couldn’t focus. So I attempted it with two phones, one the backlight and the other taking the image. This was the best result so far however left a lot of banding and extra noise.
In the end decided to flip my laptop so that the screen was facing up with a blank white background, stacking two piles of books to lay the negative on with part of the negative hanging off and take the photo with my phone. This eliminated banding, extra noise and gave me a detailed shot. After learning how to recolour a negative in photoshop I have some images that I enjoy.
