Scanning Old Negatives

I got a magic box as present this Christmas. It is a digital scanner for 35mm and 120mm film… When I opened the box I think my heart missed a beat. A digital film scanner?

Well, there is a reason for this gift. Over the past 50 years I have accumulated miles and miles of film negative strips, and somehow managed to keep them… I do not cut my film strips: I do label the negatives for the frames I printed and store them away. In boxes, old suitcases, and air-tight plastic bags.  Of course I have my favorite strips in special boxes, many of them old shoe boxes. Amazingly I have shoe boxes from countries that either do not exist anymore, or have changed their names, or at least their borders. Sometimes I think that these boxes have more historical value than the film negatives cached in them.

And since it takes about an hour to decide which frame to print in the darkroom, make a few attempts to get the right exposure, wash and hang the paper to dry, I rarely print more than 3 frames from a 36 shot 35 mm film, or 2 frames from a 12 shot 120 mm negative. The rest are kept for nostalgic reasons….!

The picture is clear: one of these days these boxes and negative strips will take over our house. We will have no place to sit or for our dog to sleep. Worse, I have nightmares that the rejected and hence non-printed negatives will join together and attack me in bed one night!

The revenge of rejected film….

So, the scanner is supposed to “easily” scan all the negatives I have and store them on a memory card not bigger than the lens cap of a 1956 rangefinder lens. Hundreds of thousands of negatives on that gizmo!

I have an open mind, and decided to try the new scanner. Here it is on my desk next to my beloved 1965 Mamiya C33 medium format camera. The scanner weighs less than the camera I have carried around my neck in 4 continents.

I searched in one of the rejected negatives’ boxes and found a strip labeled “Singapore.” There was no date. I looked at the strip holding it to the sunny window and recalled taking the pictures. It should have been in the late 1990's. It was taken in very low light, handheld, on ASA 100 film. It was off focus, so I had not printed it.

Chose a frame to be my first test on this scanner. I followed the instructions (in English but written in Taiwan, hence a mix of Chinese phraseology and mode of expression… But I figured it out.)

Pushed the "Scan" button and here is what I got:

 And here is the original size for those who would like to scroll and see the imperfections of the film and scanner:

My initial reaction was “NEVER!” That I would never transform my negatives into this low resolution, pixel happy, flat, and two-dimensional interpretation by a scanner. I think my heart stopped another beat or two.

I turned the machine off and promised to my “rejected negative strips” that I will print them only in my darkroom.

…. A few hours later I looked at the scan again, since my curiosity was not yet satisfied.

Well, albeit unintentional, there was a certain charm to this scan. I cropped the scan a bit to give it a panoramic feel (original picture was taken on 35 mm film) and a representation of what a street photographer looks for. In this case there are 10 case studies of human posture, articulation, and attitude all in one frame!

And that made me think again about the old debate concerning a “story” vs. the technical attributes of a captured moment.

…Will I use the film scanner again? I do not know. But for now the old and the new seem to have found a happy coexistence since neither tries to replace the other.

January 1, 2015

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2015