Scanning some photos from college in 1982

Link to earlier blog on my gear for scanning.

It is a lot of fun going through my work while I was in College. This is from my Junior year at East Carolina University.

Now one thing I am noticing already that I love about today's digital cameras over the film years–XML code that tells you the camera, lens, aperture and more data about the camera used to shoot the photo.

Another thing is today I embed IPTC or just think of it as all the text I want to help with the image. Caption information, Copyright, city and state information I can store today. I can even store the GPS coordinates.

This photo is from the October 9, 1982 at Ficklen Memorial Stadium in Greenville, NC with an attendance of 19,521. ECU defeated Richmond 35-14. I was able to look that up on the web.

I can also tell you there is a lot of grain in Tri-X film and there were a lot of spots where there wasn't a chemical base giving small spots.

Today I can get incredible detail that just wasn't all that possible with the Tri-X in a 35mm camera. I now understand even more why medium format gave you better resolution. You had more information than you needed.

This is a photo of Joe Jackson at Great Adventure Theme Park in Howell, NJ. While going through all the negatives I noticed more soft photos due to shutter speed issues. Today I would catch that issue much faster due to the histogram and the LCD to help check images for sharpness.

It is just fun to reminisce about the past and scanning these old photos. Hopefully I can scan some of those worth keeping and getting all the caption information embedded in the photos so they can be searched and posted online. This way historians and just anyone can search and find photos that I happened to take that they may enjoy one day. 

Scanning old negatives

Pentax K1000 & Pentax 135mm lens, Kodak Tri-X  [April 7, 1982]

My daughter is really loving theater and this made me want to pull out some photos I shot during college at East Carolina University's theater doing Show Boat.

To scan my negatives I used the Nikon Coolscan V-ED [Adorama has one for $739] On Amazon it sells for $2,000.

A high-performance dedicated film scanner from Nikon, the CoolScan V ED offers high-quality scanning of 35mm slides, 35mm film strips, APS film (with optional IX240 film adapter), and prepared slides (with optional medical slide holder). The Scanner-Nikkor ED glass lens offers a 4,000 dpi optical resolution, while the 3,964-pixel linear CCD image sensor and 14-bit A/D input (8-/16-bit output) provide true-to-life, brilliant results.

Nikon's own LED illumination technology ensures accurate color with no warm-up time or risk of heat damage. Scan times are as fast as 38 seconds including image transfer to display, and as fast as 14 seconds in preview mode. Automatic color/contrast compensation helps you achieve accurate results, while the ICE4 advanced digital image correction suite of technologies helps to restore old slides to their original glory. Additionally, the included Nikon Scan 4 software provides a comprehensive and easy-to-use interface for managing your scans.

The CoolScan V ED has a convenient plug-and-play USB interface, while one-touch scan and preview buttons will have you scanning film in no time. PC and Mac compatible, the CoolScan V ED also comes backed with a one year limited warranty.

Pentax K1000 and 50mm lens, Kodak Tri-X

Now if you have scratches and spots like in this photo here you will need to use PhotoShop to clean up the image.

SilverFast 8

Now Nikon has stopped supporting it so to make it work on my Macbook Pro I bought the software SilverFast 8.0 This software is even more advanced than the original Nikon Software that I used years ago.

Now the learning curve is a little steep to get used to scanning with the software.  Here you can see the version and what I set up for when I downloaded the software. You pick your scanner.

There are a lot of videos already made that you can watch to help you step by step. Just Google SilverFast 8 and look for just the videos, there are many to choose from.

Pentax K1000 and 50mm, Kodak Tri-X

There is one this great about the scanner. As compared to the time spent in a darkroom working on print forever burning and dodging, with the scanner and PhotoShop you can get far superior results.

Hope this inspires you.