Like many serious amateurs I have been shooting mostly slide film. But, quite often I find myself shooting negative film for various reasons which I won't go into at this time (private e-mail if you really must know). One of the big problems I find with shooting 35mm negatives is the storage and retieval of an image. I find I must store not only the negative, but also a print. And I must make sure that I can accuratly associate the print with the proper negative on the strip. Obviously, slides make storage and retrieval much simpler and they take less space, since they eliminate the problem of storing prints. I have been thinking of using digital technology to make storing and retrieving negatives easier and I would appreciate comments on my idea.

My plan is to do a relatively low resolution scan of each negative strip so that I can get a thumbnail display of each roll and a decent enough display on my monitor to decided which image is worth enlarging and then perhaps mounting. The resolution would need to be high enough to be able to form a monitor image that would tell me if 1.) the image is reasonably sharp, 2.) give me an idea if their is decent detail in dark areas, shadows, and highlights, and, 3.) allow me to judge the compostion. Each sheet of negative strips would be given a number which would correspond to the file name in which the scanned images would be stored.

This system should eliminate the problem of having to store prints and thus simplify the process of storage while reducing the time and space requirments. For the time being I anticipate printing negatives the old fashioned way, but I could always do a high resolution scan if and when I decide to go to a digital darkroom.

Your thoughts and comments are appreciated.

-- Paul DiBiase (paulcanada1@yahoo.com), August 16, 1999

Answers

I scan quite a few negatives. In fact it's my default way of working in B&W now. I do a low res scan (600x900) of each frame and save it as a jpeg (on 100MB Zip disks). Files are typically 50K-200K per image depending on how much compression I use.

I could do smaller scans, but the time saved is small and disks are pretty cheap. A 600x900 scan is big enough to be useful for web work, and even allows some cropping while keeping acceptable display quality.

However, I don't think you can judge critical sharpness from a small scan and I don't think you can really see all the shadow and highlight detail, particularly in a "difficult" negative. What you do get is a fair idea of the exposure and composition. If you work on each frame by optimizing the scan and processing the image you can pull out more shadow and highlight details, but it can take a few minutes work on each image to get the best out of each negative. This can add up to quite a bit of time if you shoot a lot.

It does beat shoboxes full of 3x5 prints though! An alternative might be an index print (aka contact sheet) that a number of labs seem to offer these days.

-- Bob Atkins (bobatkins@hotmail.com), August 16, 1999.

I have a (half finished) RDBMS which I wrote for this purpose. It's accessed via a web browser.

What I do is put a whole page of sleeved negs on a flatbed scanner and scan them (giving a digital contact-sheet). I then enter a record of each frame, including subjective assessment, location, subject, genre, keywords and any exposure or equipment data. I can then search on any of those fields.

In practice, I find that indexing my shots is too time consuming, and I'm falling further and further behind. A good rainy weekend should see me caught up, though.

Like any filing system, it will ultimately depend on your diligence in following the system.

-- Christopher Biggs (chris@stallion.oz.au), September 20, 1999.