In this modern age, all of us film photographers need a way to bring a physical strip of film into the digital space. Whether you are just trying to post your images on social media or make an inkjet print, scanning is a necessity for most analog photographers.
Epson has announced two new high-resolution photo scanners that are designed to make digitizing photos simple and approachable, both in their design and pricing.
Last year, PetaPixel wrote about photographer Ryan Kojima who built a DIY medium format camera using the CCD sensor from an Epson flatbed scanner. The DIY scanner camera captures massive, detailed 514-megapixel photos. Kojima built his first scanner camera a decade ago, although he recently upgraded it to deliver even better performance.
A photographer built a DIY medium format camera from an Epson flatbed scanner and shot a 514-megapixel picture with it.
Waiting while flatbed scanners scan a color negative film is nothing to be excited about. This process and the subsequent color precorrection can take anywhere from an hour to two.
Sean from Fotodiox has created a fun step-by-step guide that will show you how to turn any portable scanner into a 4x5 digital back for large format cameras. DIY lovers, get your tools ready, this is both simple and effective.
Fujifilm is following Kodak's lead and warning photographers about the new CT scanners being used at many US Airports starting this year. In a notice posted to the Fujifilm website, the company says the new scanners "may provide more damaging to unprocessed film and Instax film than previous generations."
If you're looking for the cheapest possible way to digitize your 35mm Negatives and Slides, the Kodak Mobile Film Scanner is probably it. Costing just $40, this cardboard contraption lets you digitize 35mm film using just your smartphone and a couple of AA batteries.
Dubai-based artist Maitha Demithan creates unusual-looking portraits of people with a surreal feel and with every subject's eyes closed or looking away from the "camera." The reason is because the "photos" were all captured using an ordinary flatbed scanner.
Epson has just announced the new FastFoto FF-680W, a wireless high-speed photo scanner that the company says is the world's fastest personal photo scanner. If you have boxes and albums filled with old prints you'd like to digitize, this scanner is designed for you.
Kodak has announced a new budget film scanner called the Scanza. Designed for consumers, the scanner can digitize a number of different film formats, from 35mm still photos to 8mm motion picture film.
I recently had a few prints made from some medium format negatives. The prints are for a specific purpose so I wanted them to be of the highest quality possible, this meant taking them to a local specialist where the film was scanned with a $16,000+ Hasselblad Flextight X1. The Flextight is about the best quality scan you can get before moving up to dedicated drum scans that can be messy, time-consuming, and expensive.
Scanning film is probably the least attractive part of shooting film, but that doesn't mean you should neglect this stage. Nowadays, we all want to share our analog images online, and the only way to do that is by digitizing our negatives one way or another.
It's not often we have a reason to write about scanners, but Epson's FastFoto FF-640 gives us one very compelling reason: speed. Dubbed the 'world's fastest photo scanner,' it can digitize prints at a blinding fast one photo per second.
I took this flower photo without a camera. It was my first experiment in scanner photography.
The creators of Scanbot—an app that lets you quickly and effectively scan documents using your phone's camera—have turned their attention to your old photos. Their new app Unfade promises to make digitizing old prints a snap, and features some built-in color restoration to boot.
Photographer Cecil Williams of Orangeburg, South Carolina, wanted a faster way to digitize 2,000 of his negatives, so he invented a new system called the FilmToaster. It's a $1,699 box that lets you digitize most popular film formats using your digital camera.
Today Microsoft announced that it has released its Office Lens app for iOS and Android. If you've never heard of it before, Office Lens is an advanced camera app that turns your phone into a scanner. Take a picture of a document or a whiteboard, and the app will automatically turn the image into a straight and clear scan.
What's neat is that the app can also be used to quickly and neatly digitize a print instead of putting the photo through an actual scanner.
This is pretty impressive: photographer Pascal Kulcsar needed to digitize some old slide film left behind by his grandfather. Rather than purchase a film scanner, Kulcsar decided to combine his technical ingenuity and love for LEGOs to create a DIY slide film scanner using LEGO pieces.
For the past couple of years, photographer Navid Baraty has been experimenting with the idea of creating photographs of the universe without having to leave his home... and without having to point a camera up at the sky. His WANDER Space Probe series of images may resemble photos captured by NASA using its Hubble telescope camera, but the photos were actually created by putting ordinary kitchen items on an Epson flatbed scanner.
Photographer Dario Morelli is a computer aided designer and programmer by trade. Several years ago, during a period of unemployment, he began diving deeply into the world of custom-made scanner cameras. There's an entire niche of photographers who are interested in the idea of turning flatbed scanners into digital cameras.
What you see is the result of one of Morelli's experiments. It's a medium format camera created by stuffing parts from an Epson scanner into a custom enclosure.
Joe Barone is a recent college grad who enjoys the process as much as the result. Inspired by his love for old objects, knack for tinkering with things and growing up in his parents’ hardware store, Barone brought the camera obscure into the 21st century recently with the help of an old scanner, a magnifying glass and duct tape... well, gold duct tape.
The result is a glorious steampunk-esque contraption that yields some rather impressive images.
If you enjoy strange and experimental photography, Nathaniel Stern's work should delight you.
For the past ten years, Stern has been creating experimental image-capturing devices using a conglomeration of hacked-together desktop scanners, battery packs and other various computer components. Once created, he straps these machines to his body and takes them from location to location capturing images unlike any other camera out there.
For those of you who, like me, enjoy shooting film on occasion but keep a predominately digital workflow, German company Reflecta has a new 35mm film scanner on the way that will blow away almost any other consumer-level scanner you're going to find.
Consumer film scanners don't provide enough detail, and professional models require too much money and pampering. What's a dedicated film nerd to do? For Peter De Smidt, the answer was to build his own high-res scanner using the Nikon D600 and 50mm Micro lens he already had on hand, a bit of lumber and a lot of patience.
"Fast Food" is a series of food photos by photographer Jon Feinstein. The images have a rather unusual look to them -- each food item is captured in front of a purely black backdrop, and is squashed on the surface as though it's being pressed against a pane of glass.
Well, actually they were: Feinstein created the images by scanning the foods with a flatbed scanner.
Gigapixel photography has become all the rage as of late, as photographers around the world are using special rigs to shoot numerous photos of a scene and then stitching them together into an uber-high-res panorama. Austrian photographer Kurt Hoerbst is taking the high-res photo-stitching concept and applying it to a different subject: human subjects.
Focus stacking is when you combine multiple photographs of different focus distances in order to obtain a single photo with a much greater depth of field than any of the individual shots. This can be done by turning the zoom ring on your lens, but this can be difficult to control (especially for highly magnified photos). It can also be done using special rigs designed for the purpose, but those are generally quite pricey.
Photographer and software engineer David Hunt recently came up with the brilliant idea of turning an old flatbed scanner into a macro rail for shooting focus-stacking photos.
In addition to being passionate about image making, photographer Svjetlana Tepavcevic is also an avid collector of seeds. After finding and collecting a new specimen, Tepavcevic creates a highly-detailed high-resolution photo of the seed using an ordinary flatbed scanner. The resulting images form a project titled Means of Reproduction.
If you shoot film and aren't much into chemicals (or don’t have a basement in which to keep a gigantic 5×7″ enlarger), you’ll soon find yourself needing a way to import those beautiful pictures you’ve taken onto your computer. What? Why didn’t I say, “you'll need a scanner”? After all, it’s not 1987 anymore -- scanners are as common as toaster ovens.
One of the latest entrants in the at-home film scanning game is the Plustek OpticFilm 120. Just announced a few months ago and made available for pre-orders earlier this month, the OpticFilm 120 is a professional caliber scanner that can digitize both 35mm and 120mm medium format film. With a price tag of $2,000, it's not exactly wallet-friendly for the average film shooter, but is quite affordable when compared to other medium-format pro-grade scanners on the market.
If you've been wondering about the image quality of the scanner (and whether or not it stacks up well against your local photo lab), Plustek has released a few full-resolution untouched scans.
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We shared a couple weeks ago that it's possible to scan film using an ordinary flatbed scanner and a DIY cardboard adapter, but did you know you can also use a large-screen cell phone or tablet computer to provide the necessary backlighting? All you need is a way to turn a large portion of the screen entirely white (e.g. a "flashlight" app). Simply place the device facedown over the film on the scanner, and scan it with the cover open.
If you've tried to scan film using an ordinary flatbed scanner as you would a piece of paper, you've probably discovered that it didn't turn out very well. The reason is because film needs to be illuminated from behind, while conventional scanners capture light that's reflected off what they're scanning. Before you give up hope and shell out money for a film scanner, here's some good news: you can build a cheap and simple cardboard adapter that turns any scanner into a film scanner!
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Did you know that flatbed scanners make fun portrait cameras as well? Just place your cat on the glass, do a quick scan, and you'll have a strange looking portrait shot from below! Apparently this is pretty popular among cat lovers -- a Flickr search for "cat scanner" returns thousands of results! This gives "cat scan" a whole new meaning!
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