Digitizing Black & White Negatives

During the 1970s and 80s, I spent a great deal of time working with black and white photography. Like so many others, I truly enjoy the beauty of a nice “gray scale” image. Using my 35 mm cameras and trusty old Tri-X, I created over 3000 images.

I was teaching photography to high school students in Kennebunk, Maine during those days, so I had plenty of darkroom time. In addition, I built a few photo labs of my own at the various places I lived. I remember telling the photography students there would come a time when we used some form of electronic image capture in place of film. Some thought that sounded cool, others laughed.

Most of my best black and white work made it into print form; 5x7, 8x10, 11x14, some matted, most just stored in boxes. I threw out many photographs, but I still have some of those original prints. (I even coated various materials, glass, leather, stone, with emulsion and made prints on those surfaces.)

Well I ended up with this binder of about 2800 35 mm black and white negatives, some were made into prints and have since been scanned, and others are still only negatives. (I also have a collection of slides, color negatives, and large format negatives, but that’s a story for another time.)

So about ten years ago, I decided that I would find a way to digitize these negatives. And now, the job is finally done. I used a slide copying adapter (Nikon ES-E28) that screwed on to the lens of my Nikon Cool Pix 4500. The 4500 was one of the best cameras in its day (and still has many design features superior to today’s digital cameras), but mostly I bought it because of the adapter. It not only has the ability to crop and zoom and thus copy 35mm slides, but it also includes a negative holder, that allows you to re-photograph 35mm film. I have never seen anything as versatile or convenient as this device, since. If anyone has any suggestions for similar equipment, please share this with us all.

Photographing 35 mm negatives has its problems – DUST. You will either spend hours cleaning your negatives or hours using computer software to remove the specs, but we had those problems when we printed onto paper from negatives. Then there is getting the light right. The adapter is illuminated by whatever light source you point it at. Over the years I got lazy sometimes and simply pointed the thing out the window, and cranked one negative through after another. This sloppy, uneven illumination shows in some of the negatives. And finally, this process takes forever (or ten years in my case). It becomes a bit tedious, and after a few hundred shots, one tends to put the project aside for a few months.

Well anyway, the photographing part is done (I still have the slides, color film and larger format negatives, but…). At this point I used a great program called Irfanview, http://www.irfanview.com/, to convert the negatives to positives and reduce the color level to grayscale. This can all be done in one batch process, using Irfanview.

There is something to be said for working with the positive (reversed negative) images while in color, e.g. not converting them immediately to grayscale. You can work with the different colors as layers to achieve effects similar too using filters. But I am happy just getting all those negatives into a massive collection of B&W images. Besides, the negatives were captured in color and are all stored as jpgs in color.

Now, what do I do with all 2000 images? I think I’ll make a movie with a few of them, limiting myself only to the tools found in Picasa, but that’s for a later post.