'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe

Another Sunday, another random film!

This negative claims to be a Fuji Color 200, so I'm scanning this one as Fuji Super HR 200 Gen 1. That gives... well, old-film-like white balance for the Battle Abbey photos, and fairly decent colour for the flypast ones. Eh, I've spent enough time playing around with presets in the hope of finding something that matches this type of film (Fuji Color seems particularly tricky to scan, which is a pain as I've got a lot of it).

( Photos! )

Bonus post!

Today's random film Red 7189 - a fitting identifier, as it's got these chaps in it. This is from a few years back when I spotted that the Red Arrows and the Vulcan were going to display at the Goodwood Festival of Speed. It was not long after Father's Day which elemnar and I hadn't done anything for yet, so we came up with a sort of delayed Father's Day outing for The Gnu to go and watch it. This was very much planned at the last moment so we didn't actually visit the Festival of Speed, but instead trundled off to The Trundle, an iron age hill fort on the Downs north of Chichester that's well placed to see the display (allegramente posted about it at the time). I brought the F-301 and a couple of rolls of film (though it looks like allegramente may have managed better photos with her cellphone!), and here's the first of the two films!

This one just has the Red Arrows in it - film Red 7190 (which I need to rescan as VueScan decided to change the colour correction settings it was using halfway through) also has the Vulcan.

( Red 7189: Red Arrows over Goodwood 2014 )

Guardians of the Galaxy 2 is awesome. There's so many great moments from it (half of which had the cinema chuckling), but I think the most hilarious was the spontaneous Pac-Man - which was simultaneous totally unexpected and yet entirely appropriate (and very neatly foreshadowed as well).

Don't ask me why I'm scanning another random film at Nik o'clock...

This time it's Black 3657, ostensibly a roll of Kodak Gold 200-7 but I'm actually using the Gold 200 Gen 2 preset (later ones give a blue cast to the scan). The VueScan generic setting loses a lot of shadow detail, and likewise with restore colours or restore fading. I've ranted before about trying to colour balance film - the other fun challenge is the response curve of film is decidedly non-linear and depends a lot on the particular chemistry used. And no-one appears to produce correction tables for anything remotely modern. On the plus side, being ISO 200 there's a lot less grain.

Another random aside: as well as adding artificial film grain, one can now get look-up tables designed to alter the colours of digital footage to match the characteristics of film.

( Enough ranting. Photos! )

Today's random film is Red 0787, a roll of Kodak MAX 400-8 dating from the winter of 2006-2007. This one seems to have rather grainy photos - yes, it's an ISO 400 film and fast films do tend to have more grain, but this seems worse than usual. I know Nikon scanners are known to suffer from some aliasing with film grain but here the same noise is present in the prints.

In some ways the grain adds to the charm of using film instead of digital. A lot of digitally-filmed big-budget films and TV shows actually have artificial film grain added in post-production!

( Photos! )

Random film time! This is film #JM150638, a roll of Agfa HDC 400-2, scanned with Restore Fading enabled as it's the best part of 20 years old and has come a long way...

( Photos! )

Random film time! Blue 1157! With DX code 005813, this is a roll of Fujicolor Superia X-TRA 800 of all things. I'm not sure where I managed to find ISO 800 film, or why I bothered using it for outdoor photography in the Canon - presumably it was whatever Boots were selling at the time. I'm scanning it as "Fuji Super G 400 Gen 1" which isn't quite right, but looks to be about the closest Fuji preset. Colour correction for colour negative film is something of a black art, not helped by the lack of presets for anything vaguely modern.


( Anyway, photos! )

Random film time! Today's mystery film is... Blue 1626! Another one from late in my university days. One evening pleaseremove was round, and we (along with most of the house) spontaneously decided to drive to Beachy Head to watch the sunset. I posted a couple of digital photos back in 2007, but I also took the Nikon F-301 with me.

The film is another rebranded Fujicolor 200 (I probably bought a bag of the stuff from Boots) so I'm trying the same settings as last time.

As a random aside, the back of the film has been gunked with something or other, which Boots presumably didn't notice when developing it as the marks are visible in their prints. Since it was the base side rather than the emulsion I attacked it (very gently!) with a few drops of isopropyl-alcohol-containing lens cleaner which quite happily dissolved the gunk. Infra-red cleaning took care of the rest. Result!

( Photos! )

Random film time! Today's film is... "BJ010859", and it's an old one with photos from several holidays and trips, including Christmas in Falmouth. It's no newer than 1999 and probably quite a bit older than that based on what size elemnar is in the photos! Back then I was using a point'n'shoot 35mm camera - a Canon Snappy LXII.

It's another Boots film, this time with a DX code of 018494 which reveals it to actually be an Agfa Perutz SC 400-2 Color film. Hmm... let's try preset Agfacolor XRG/XRS 400 with 3% white/black points (it's not like I'm doing this for archive purposes and trying for a perfect scan).

( Photos! )

Today's demonstration of how having the correct colour profile makes a difference involves a roll of 35mm film. Specifically, Fuji-brand film (I think a Fujicolor Superia 200).

Anyway, I recently dug the SLR out to take some photos of the local D-Day commemorations, and having finished the roll of film wandered along to Boots to get it developed (being about the only place still around that actually knows what to do with real film). I picked up the prints a couple of days later, and they looked a bit, well, underwhelming. Either the sky was washed out or the planes were in shadow, and there was a definite colour cast as well. I'd also gotten a photo CD on a whim, and the photos on that were also less than I was expecting - only 2136x1534 JPEGs for the "HIRES" ones.

Case in point: here's one of the Boots scans:


I'd seen this before with the photos I took at the Bournemouth airshow last year, but then I put it down to the 500mm mirror lens I was using. This time however I was using a much sharper 35-105mm Nikkor lens, and was expecting more detail in the photos. So I dug out an old Nikon Coolscan III, convinced it and its SCSI card to install on Windows 7 64-bit, and pointed VueScan at it. And got much the same result as the Boots prints. Hmm.

Then I had a poke around in the VueScan settings, found the "Negative vendor/brand/type" options, and experimented. And wouldn't you know, but if you change it from "Generic" to something else, you end up with a very different photo...



That was with the Kodak, Gold, 200 Gen 6 preset - the readme suggests playing around with the Kodak Advantix or Gold presets for recent Fuji films. I'm sure it could still be improved on if I could be bothered to properly calibrate the scanner, but as it stands it's enough of an improvement (at a much higher resolution as well - 3700x2500) that I'm happy!