I built a perfect home film scanner

check out this print It's So Meta it's a film print I took on 35 mm of my daughter taking a film photo with my yesika that I've had since I was a teenager at one of my favorite weird locations an abandoned vrum there's just too many things for me to love in one shot and another cool aspect is that I scanned and digitized this print by myself with my camera this print is from a few years ago when I scanned my first batch of negatives with my old Sony camera which I don't miss and an old Canon zoom lens which I actually do miss with some extension tubes in between I just put the film on a crappy light table and stood the lens right on it like balanced the lens right against the film terrible technique don't tell any film preservationists so I set out to make a more permanent film scanning setup I know the these things exist I know you can get mounts for your camera and back lit film Advanced levers but what fun is there in sping a bunch of money on one of those setups when I just wanted to figure out how to make it myself with stuff I already had and what do I have laying around in my garage like we all have laying around in our garages Vintage Film enlargers wait you don't have a vintage classic film enlarger laying around then why do I have to maybe maybe I have your enlarger that's why I have to I have your enlarger as well right or maybe I just have a problem collecting junk so back in the old days in high school I had a film developing lab in my basement I would shoot my film on an old Lon nyer MAAC camera that I totally destroyed and wore out and develop the negatives in my basement if you're interested in shooting film and interested in shooting black and white it's very very easy to develop your negatives at home you don't need a lot of supplies and usually these supplies you can find on classifi are like Craigslist or Marketplace pretty regularly I recommend it and then I would develop my film to get my negatives so a bit of a background I don't know if you need a refresher but a negative is literally a negative light comes through the lens of the camera and projects onto the negative the brighter the light that's coming through like the sky or my pasty white skin the more more it burns into the negative making the negative darker darker areas like a dark rock or something black reflect less light in the real world so that light coming through the lens will burn less into the negative and that area will actually stay brighter that's why a negative is a [Music] negative and then back in the lab under the glow of a red light I would sell my body I mean I mean develop my prints sorry I'm getting to very different periods of my like mixed up so I'd put my negatives in up here and then they would project down here onto light sensitive paper making another big negative but this time a negative of your negative is a positive it's the circle of light and the red light that I talk about and that you see in films and stuff is real and it's the light that you can do print work with so you can see what you're doing you can see your image forming when it's in the developer bath and it also makes for some cool movie scenes developing was fun and I even did my own glamour shots as a teenager everyone thought they were funny at the time but now I get asked is that how you actually dressed I'm realizing that so much time has passed my parody photo photo shoot is now closer to the time I was parodying than to today but you're not here for my Nostalgia for the dark room or any of that sort of stuff so to the point scanning film you need to get your camera overhead you can do it with your tripod my tripod is old and it doesn't quick tilt or any of that sort of stuff and it's very fussy and even if it did micro adjusting it's height is tricky takes up a lot of space it's hard to put on a table so I wanted a better way and a more permanent way and a way that made me more excited to scan film having a like semi-permanent workstation for film scanning I also have these magic arms that I do for like footage like this where I'm overhead of my workstation but anytime you make an adjustment they have a big sag to them they're not fine camera control what can give us a permanent setup and very granular very fine focus control uh film enlarger my old film enlarger and since I'm not interested in making prints at the moment and just want digital versions of these I was willing to totally tear apart an enlarger to make this work and so the best surprise is that it took about 3 minutes to do turns out the head of this enlarger is held on by 1 38 screw which if you know anything about tripods and tripod heads is that's the main screw that holds a tripod head onto a tripod base and I thought I had discovered the best hack in all of history I felt so proud of inventing a new use for enlargers that is until I downloaded the original user manual for this enlarger that I have and found a section where it literally says how to use this enlarger as a photo copying machine how to copy prints documents whatever you needed to do in the old days so really what I had thought was inventing a hack was just rediscovering a wellth thought out already existing use for an enlarger so what ever I didn't think of mounting a camera on and a larger first fine fine but what I am going to do which is enlisted in here is I'm going to scan my negatives with it so I've converted all my day-to-day mounts that I use for photography or YouTube to ARCA Swiss it's very generic if you buy a cheap tripod ball head on Amazon it will be ARCA Swiss so I have lots of these ballheads hanging around in fact there's a cheap Amazon ballhead filming me right now and when you see videos of me up in my cabin I have a cheap ball head that's clamped onto an old microphone stand it's not sexy but it gets the job done it's actually the best because the base is heavy but it has a small footprint anyways so I can dedicate one of these ballheads to this enlarger it just screws on in a couple seconds and then I can get my camera overhead just make sure that your camera is actually pointing straight down which is a little bit tricky my preferred method is super silly and I've made a video about this it's to simply just tie a string to a nut and hang it from visually the center of your lens and let it come to rest down on your surface and then reframe your camera around that and then any other small tweaks you can just do in your software later my first round I used a Canon zoom lens with extension tubes this time around I've borrowed from a friend a couple Canon 100 mm macro lenses so we're going to see that together for the first time on these prints so next we need to hold the negatives if you look at negatives they often don't want to lay flat so you need some sort of holder you could use glass if you wanted to but the problem with glass is that every surface that you shoot through when you're scanning negatives collects dust and when you're scanning negatives dust is your enemy so in the past I made a negative holder out of foam core but it was super terrible it was like garbage two layers of foam core with like a slightly bigger than 35 mm window that I could scan the negatives through it was absolute garbage and since that didn't work very well I started to look around on thingaverse which is a website where people can upload 3D printable files and on there I found some design files for a 35mm negative holder and I asked my son to 3D print them for me so I have this 3D printed 35mm negative holder it clamps together with simple elastics and it holds it really nice and flat so I'll link to those design files down below and you should just print your if you don't have a 3D printer or someone you know doesn't have one pretty much every library has one so just take your library card and my God you better have a library card just make sure it's printed in black plastic so you don't get any weird color casts or Reflections or light bouncing around I just have to bug my son now to print me one that will hold 120 film or medium format film and finally finally the last part of our setup is a backlight you need to backlight your negative in order to scan it the good thing is that film quality LEDs are very common now and very affordable so if you have a little LED mini panel or something like that just make sure you have a couple layers of diffusion to really soften the light before it gets to your negative but make sure that that diffusion isn't too close to your film because if you use paper or something like that if it's on the same focal plane as your negative you'll actually pick up that texture a white shopping bag or kitchen garbage bag bags that plastic if it's stretched and tight has no grain to it and it's actually a really great diffusion and to shim up my negative holder I have a little bin in my office of scrap 2x4s and 2x2 off cuts and I basically make mini apple boxes like you would have on a film set to get under things to lift things up I just sanded them smooth so I don't get slivers and I use them all over the place just to like lift things up or rig things up in an interesting way [Music] [Applause] [Music] oh [Music] [Music] [Music] m [Music] [Music] so this setup is complicated but you don't even need to do anything like this you can literally tape a piece of garbage white garbage bag onto your window and hold your negative against that with your fingers to scan it to take a photo you can do it with an iPhone you can get VR goggles and use the little lens in them to create a little mini and larger there's so many ways to get negatives into your camera without having to mail them away and all of these scans are totally great like look again at this print I did with extension tubes it's not perfect but for me it's only stuff I'll notice and I can't wait to get it up on the wall these are the first scans from the station as I'm recording this I haven't even seen these so I am so literally [Music] excited this is Jesse from the future and I'm just looking through my first scans with the setup and they are great they are clear and crisp where my old skins were soft on the edges a weird motion blur these are sharp from corner to corner you can see every bit of grain and dust but in my old scans I added a bit of grain on top to hide a bit of this where this is the way it should be and to me these are Gallery quality scans all I want to do is inspire you to shoot film develop it at your house and then be able to scan it and post it on Instagram or your website or wherever it is very simply and enjoy it make it a hobby make it a part of your your process because that's what the creative life is about is finding your process finding your way to get your ideas in front of people to see whatever it takes however ugly a rig it is I'm going to make myself cry I Inspire myself so much sometimes that it's it's just beautiful and I feel like I'm going to tear up because I love art so much almost as much as you [Music] he

Channel: Jesse Senko

Views: 73,870

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Id: ZqRFMSjsBeE

Length: 13min 43sec (823 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 19 2023