UNIT 3 - AO3 - Display Pt.1 | Scanning

Film Photography has always been a big part of my work, it all started the end of my GCSE Photography course in the summer of 2014, where I found and borrowed a 35mm SLR camera, over the summer of that year I shot my first four rolls of 35mm film ever and deeply excited and caught in the process that is analog photography, unfortunately the camera became un-usable however, severall months later I finally bought my own 35mm SLR and during the last 8-ish months have shot over 8 rolls whilst experimenting with colour film for the first time. Film Photography somewhat forced me to learn how to shoot manually, it slowed me down in taking my photographs and has lead me to finding new photographers whos work and style I look up to. I liked the qualities so much I bought a Full Frame (35mm) Digital camera so I can get some of those qualities on digital. Because of this some part of me has always wanted to produce a display in the theme of film.

When I was trouble shooting my idea I came across an idea to paint a wall in the shape of a 35mm film strip and have around 6 Photo frames be mounted where the photographs on the film strip would be, after discussing this with my Teachers and researching the costs I realised this would be too much.

The alternative I later came up with was to just print out the contact sheet in A3 photo paper and cover a display wall in it, but to see how that would look I would first have to find a way of scanning my film. After googling various techniques I came a cross an idea to use a flat-bed scanner, the way this works is you get your film and lay it out in the scanner where you would then open the product into Adobe Photoshop where you would then adjust the settings to produce the finished image. There was just one problem; Resolution. My idea was to have the scans blown up to a size where one or two images could fit onto an A3 page and when I first tested the scan the .Dpi Resolution was only 400. I fixed this problem by hacking the printers settings using the 'command prompt' application where I reset the max DPI resolution to 2400, now a scan size would be around 1.5/2.5GB compared to 80MB, However this did cause some issues later on. Because the file-size is so huge, when it came to editing the time it would take just to alter one setting (e.g. rotate 90* or flip horizontally) could take up to an hour to adjust, the work-process became very, very slow. However, because of the resolution I believe my time and effor was well spent, the gallery bellow demonstrates the raw power of the resolution I have obtained:

Screen Shot 2015-11-18 at 17.17.17

Screen Shot 2015-11-18 at 17.17.04

Screen Shot 2015-11-18 at 17.08.24

Over the next few days I scanned around 3/4 of my rolls of my black and white film and the results came through, (you can find the full resolution photograph on this link)here is one of the scans I produced:

To produce this I had to:

take the capture from the scanner

open it in Adobe Photoshop

Invert the colours

Make it black and white

open levels and adjust the shadows and highlights of RGB setting and the RED setting until the photographs look exposed.

Those were the settings for scanning and editing a contact sheet for black and white film, with colour I've found it far more difficult to do as once I've done most of those steps (excluding the levels and black and white part) I have to open the levels and adjust all of the colour settings to try and get the colour to be just right as if I were to just invert it the film would have an over-exposed blue tinge over it.

Overall I have managed to successfully scan a roll of film at ultra-high resolution and am now able to print the photographs in large in A3 prints. To continue this project please continue to part 2 which can be found on the 'A-LEVEL ART COURSEWORK' page.