The joys of scanning negatives

Recently I gave the website a small face-lift, more organized, better photo's and the other usual areas that I (in all honesty) tend to neglect. Part of that included digitizing some files that I had never used digitally for an engagement. As the shoot was done in digital, but I happened to have my trusty AE-1 program there as well. I plugged the strobes in and fired off a roll of Illford HP4 just for fun. A few weeks later I developed the film and one of the photo's ended up being one of the best of the entire shoot much to my surprise. I enlarged the negative into a pair of 8x10 prints for the couple as a small gift a few weeks before the wedding.

So as I needed to get a few digital files for the website I figured it would be a good idea to get the whole roll digitized. Now one of my favorite parts of darkroom work is the contact sheet. There is something so true and real about seeing 36 small little prints laying out in front of you. And we can all be honest, there is a large bit of nostalgia from seeing contact sheets used in photo shoots back in the day. Yet a lot of that is lost unless you have a negative scanner with a transparency unit large enough for 8x10... which many of us don't. Yet you do get a small single line sample when scanning on the scanner I have (which by the way is an Epson V330 that I am very happy with). So while scanning these negatives, there are occasions where you get lucky and the few images that scan onto your one line contact sheet tell a story. This is one of those times.


It encompasses everything that was the shoot. An image close to what we were trying to achieve as the end result is first. The peck on the cheek second. And the giggle third. Finally we come to the end, where the giggle has become a silly time and the couple was truly relaxed with the camera in front of them. It is little surprises like this that keep me enthralled in the world of film photography. Surprises that pop up that if I had a lab scan I would never have noticed, or had these been digital they would have all been deleted. Yet here lay 4 images that together tell a wonderful story of love and fun. By the way we would go on to get the shot that ended up on the wedding invitations from that roll of film that was shot on a whim.