I initially tried scanning a strip of super8 film with my epson scanner and then converting that to a video file. However the image came out really blurry:
Last week I tried again with a different approach: I tried to emulate the concept of the video workprinter made by moviestuff. I simply held a 30 year old Minolta 50mm prime lens in front of my HV20 HDV camcorder and tried to focus on the strip of film dangling in free air in front of a semy transparent piece of plastic backlit by an ordinary tungsten lamp.
The result:
Note that this has been scaled down to DV video width (720pixels wide) to make it fit the webpage a bit better and to increase perceived crispness. This particular frame was captured as 1920×1080 to the camera’s mini-sd flash card. Just ignore the 16by9 aspect ration, i accidentally had the camcorder in 1080p resolution. I later made some additional captures in 2k resolution, but those had bad overall focus because the film dangled out of its ideal position.
BTW, i think this is the highest resolution super8 frame scan ever published on the internet. All sample frames I ever saw were around measly 320×240 pixels resolution. Please prove me wrong and point me to higher resolution files (maybe from Rank transfers).
As mentioned, i didn’t even make sure that the film was pressed flat to some surface, it was literally dangling in free air – there is a lot of headroom for improvement still. The chromatic aberration might be attributed to the limited quality optics used in the cheap HV20, just imagine how this would have looked if i’d used a Cooke lens on a RED ONE ;-). Well a more realistic solution would be a Nikon D40 with a hefty zoom lens, like a 300mm or so.
Only thing missing now is a film transport and some kind of rig to hold everything together. And maybe a liquid dispenser/collector system for a wet process.
Some other guy that did a more fleshed out rig using his epson scanner: Harri Kaimio’s website
I has only been a short time since digital cameras meant evil. And still, it is mostly true, that digital cameras produce ugly images. Partly due to our fallen world containing a lott of ugly things. A selective focus really helps to draw attention to the aestethic remains.
Most people are no artists. They use cameras merely as visual memory-crutches. And the cameras they own, Canon IXUS and the likes, do just that. They capture reality – all of it. At least that part which is in front of the lens.
And then there are the artists. What is art? It is communication. I communicate what i perceive with a photograph. So the image must be strongly subjective, it must see what I see, not what is in front of the camera. I could also do an ugly picture with an unlimited depth of field and paint funny circles around things that caught my attention.
But now that cameras like the Nikon D700 and Canons 5DMkII have become available digital finally catches up visually with film.
And how cool ist that?
There is one special camera that caught my interest: the Sigma DP1. That is the only compact (non-SLR) digital camera with a significantly larger sensor (20.7 × 13.8mm). But the lens on the thing is way too wide angle to make it usable for portrait photography, which is my main area of interest. This is quite stupid, since portraits are the one thing that suffers most from tiny imaging sensors. And all of the sample image section on www.sigma-dp1.com is completely devoid of portrait photographs, go figure. Sure the larger sensor also produces better signal to noise ratio and dynamic range, but those do not contribute directly to artistic imagery.
