Another cunning plan, perchance?

(partially x-posted to Another cunning plan, perchance? at ~the-boggyb on deviantArt)

This is not my cunning plan for NaBloPoMo - as it happens, I've yet to deploy my cunning plan (despite it potentially being so cunning that you could put a tail on it and call it a weasel...). But while searching through a crate of stuff the other day I came up with another plan entirely. I realised that although I take an awful lot of photos, very few of them make it beyond a folder on my computer.

Or, in this case, a box full of negatives and prints. See, every once in a while I try my hand at old-school photography with The Gnu's Nikon F-301 and a fistful of 35mm film.

So my new plan is to every so often pick a set of prints, scan the negatives (pleaseremove regularly mocks the fact that I have a SCSI card of all things in this computer, so I ought to at least make use of the film scanner it's attached to - a Nikon Coolscan III), and post the best photos here.

How long will this last? Who knows. You never know, I may keep up with this plan long enough to run out of 35mm negatives and dig out the disc films from the distant past...

Blue 1624: Brighton photos

Scanning 35mm negatives is a tricky job - the default settings have a tendency to be very dull, with a poor colour cast and no detail in dark areas. Now, I can't be bothered with trying for a perfect scan but I'm certainly happy to tweak things a little to get a better result, and the easiest tweak appears to be to tell VueScan just what type of film I'm using. Boots own-brand makes this trickier, but I did some poking around and found out that Boots stuff is most likely rebranded Fujifilm and the DX barcode (the black stripes next to the sprocket holes) can be decoded to work out just what it is - I used DXsim to decode the barcode, and then the Dexter database to decode the barcode. Other tweaks are setting the colour balance to "White balance", white and black points to 5% (i.e. the top/bottom 5% of the input range is clamped - this increases the contrast), and enabling light infrared cleaning.

To keep track of which films I've been through, I'm using the stickers that Boots marked them with when processing them. I've not run into any duplicates yet...

Anyway, enough photographic mumbo-jumbo. Today's film is... *digs through box* blue 1624! This is a roll of Boots own-brand ISO 200 (DX number 001304, so actually Fujicolor 200 - I'm scanning as "Fuji Super G 200") containing photos from my time at university, probably late 3rd-year. In fact, they may well be the photos I alluded to in this post!

( Photos! )