PHotovestad

Following the last post and subsequent to posting some of my Caff-C experiments to Flickr it was suggested to me by another flickie that perhaps the sprocket marks on my images were a result of something that I was doing when scanning the negatives rather than anything actually on the negatives themselves.  I had another, (and another, and another) look and just couldn’t see these marks on the film so I set the scanner back up and did a few tests. As it turns out this is a scanning artifact and I can reproduce it if I want to.

The negative strips are very curved and there was no way the negative carrier that ships with the V500 was going to keep these flat.  Since I scan 4x5 under a sheet of glass I thought I’d do the same with these.  Going against common wisdom I have been scanning with the emulsion side up thinking that since the scanner is shining light down through the film that having the matte, emulsion side facing the light source would give better results than having the reflective side of the film face the light. For today’s test I scanned the negs between 2 sheets of glass and with just a piece of glass on top. The 2 pieces of glass produced a fine scan. Emulsion side down with one glass was no problem. The single sheet scenario with the emulsion side up reproduced the sprocket pattern.

It seems that the edges of the negatives resting against my piece of glass at a slight angle rather than sitting flat against it was causing the light to bounce around and bend in such a way as to create this effect. Technically the scan with the negatives produced the “best quality” scan but I still like these ones the best.