James Ballantyne

Its Liminal Everyday

Half In Wood, Half In Iron

Garmisch

Paris

The Mistakes I Made - Scanning Film

To begin, the purpose of this blog is not to shame or judge anyone starting out in the realm of analogue film photography, this blog is aimed at reflecting upon my own early photography journey. Bringing to light habits I adopted and then later changed or stopped doing through learning and practice. It is important to highlight the mistakes I made throughout this journey which were key learning opportunities.

Dust

When I got my flatbed scanner I did not truly understand the difficulty of the learning curve that was scanning. It's a long arduous process.

When I began first scanning in my film, I believed I had a vague understanding on how to use it. I was wrong. The room I used to scan was my carpeted bedroom. Trying to keep dust off of your film in a carpeted is a challenging affair that would certainly drive anyone insane. But to add to this already difficult set up, my large dog ronnie would also sit in my room, he often got lonely so would look for company. Ronnie had rather long hair. Not only this, sometimes I would scan in woolen jumpers. Every aspect of this made keeping dust and hair off my film impossible. I did have A rocket air blower that would temporarily remove hair, as well as a squirrel hair duster. It was futile. However with perseverance, moderate frustration and photoshop anything is possible. Although a temporary solution to a bigger issue. If I could I would have a non carpeted room, with a fan in to help remove dust and other airborne matter.

At the time I didn't have cotton gloves and to be honest I didn't understand why they were necessary. My mother worked in care homes so you got me some thin latex free gloves, so I used them. It worked. Not particularly great for the overall environment but an end to a means. I found with the gloves that sometimes hair would stick to them which was a double edged sword. I could get hair and matter off that my blower or duster couldn't get but I could also accidentally put hair on.

If the Glove Fits

Speaking of gloves, when the latex free ones had run out, I went to purchase some new ones but the boxes were rather expensive. I tried to work around the issue, but I ended up getting washed up gloves. They did the job. But the thickness of the rubber did make it difficult to move and do things that required precision. When I had this set up, it was in a studio flat where the desk was next to the door of the hallway. Not my decision, it was just the layout. Sometimes when I scanned the film would be out of focus or have wavy errors and other weird things happening. I deduced it to be the neighbors walking in the hallway. The floors in the hallway seemed to be very loose and caused my desk and mac to shake slightly resulting in imperfections in my scanning.

If you are reading this and thinking my god this is terrible practice. You are right. I have to start somewhere, my mistakes are opportunities for learning. You'll be glad to know I now have a bag of cotton gloves. I also found the gloves reduce marks and oily fingers from reaching the film, potentially ruining it.

More Quality Than Sense

To add to the extending catalogue of learning mistakes. I used to shoot a lot of 35mm. So I would often scan them in batches, sometimes doing 4 hour stints or even longer. The reason why it would take so long was because I thought, if I can scan them at any quality, it might as well be high quality. So I scanned far too many rolls with each shot being 150-200MBs each. I did initially try to do it all in 2gb but after waiting about 30 minutes for a shot I had decided it wasn't worth it. Scanning at a high quality if it serves a purpose. I did not have one, I simply did it because I could. Most of those shots will never see the light of day and are sat on my ssd as I type this. Most are covered in dust and hair. It might seem crazy to have done this but at least now I know what my own limitations are. I can now work within these limits. Especially since I have favoured larger formats over the past years. Perseverance and practice make improvement.