Wednesday, May 21, 2008

My new scanner finally got delivered...

...next door...two hours before I had to be at work. FedEx may be fast and a lot easier on fragile items than UPS, but they've only gotten one delivery to us in three years; everything goes to the neighbors despite the sign on our gate, clearly visible from the turnoff to the neighbors' house. Fortunately I spotted the truck on its way out and jogged over there to get it. I should have done a self portrait afterwards - it's been nearly 20 years since I was any good at running, and it was 93 degrees at the time.

I only got to play with it for a little while before having to get ready for work, but here are a couple of scans (scanned at 1200dpi so this laptop wouldn't choke on the adjustments, scaled and/or cropped for easier uploading via this cellular connection) from the bike race last weekend. I left it running some 2400dpi scans of the next couple of strips, and out of curiosity I tried 4800dpi on some color negatives...it's really slow, but the quality is worth the wait. I'm almost afraid to see how long it will take on 120 negs, but it ought to look really nice.

KTR400p1r001f006

KTR400p1r001f010-Crop

The bottom one is cropped somewhat, and starting to show the lost resolution of the 1200dpi scan. I'll have to retry that same crop from a 4800dpi run and see how it looks.

For those keeping score, these are from Tri-X 400 pushed one stop w/TMax Developer. As the sun came up a bit more and the thin overcast got thinner, I switched to Ilford Delta Pro 100. Looking at the negs, there's a marked difference in density, but it hardly shows on the scans even before tweaking in GIMP. As I get them scanned and edited, the workable ones will make their way to Flickr.

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