Photographing B&W negatives

When photographing some dull test objects to find the limits of my new PL45, I somehow got the idea to take old B&W negatives as a subject. I have always been mightily unimpressed by the speed and quality of my flatbed scanner, but this turned out as a very positive surprise.
After some fiddling around I settled for a very simple setup with my GF1+PL45 on a tripod, the negatives in my Durst negative holder (from my old enlarger), and a plain white piece of cardboard as background illumination under 45 degrees directed towards a window.
The resolution&sharpness of this combo is more than enough to resolve the negatives really on grain level. The dynamic range is easily captured by the sensor. After processing through ACR, the results were more than satisfactory and it was a joy to be able to redo digitally what took hours of darkroom time and retouching back in the 80's.

If you have a good macro lens but no film scanner (like I do), you might give it a try.

Of course I want to share results, which is a terrific excuse to post some older material.

From 1984 (I was 14 or 15 at the time), taken with a Minolta SR-T 101 and MC55/1.7 with orange filter on FP4:



Taken during alpine training in the Swiss Alps near Arolla.

From 1985, same equipment:



Also taken during alpine training, but now in Austria near the Kaunergrathütte in the Pitztal. Perhaps nice to know is that this photo was taken during an exercise simulating a drop into a crack in a glacier (you were lowered rather gently into the crevasse hanging on a rope) after which you had to climb out by yourself using rope (prusiking). Before doing so I took this photo. The blue toning is a digital redo of the actual chemical blue toning I did back in 1985.

From 1990, Minolta X500 with MD50/1.7 on T-Max 100. This is from the time that I didn't have a darkroom permanently to my disposal, and I have never printed this image:

 

Getting it parallel is not that difficult. With the camera on manual focus and the focus assist, you can easily check whether the complete field is in focus.

Setup is as follows. It is really simple. It can help to cover the space between the lens and the negative holder to prevent straylight in the dark parts of the negative. But the piece of cardboard I used for that came from a pizza box

 

I spent quite some time on doing that, but it was more difficult than I thought. The removal of the orange mask is actually the easy part. Don't invert the image in ACR, but add a layer in Photoshop filled with the mask color (sampled from film area in between images or a really black part in the image) and set the blending to "difference". But all color channels have a different response curve that need individual tweaking. I did that by adding a levels layer, but it took way more time than was practical. And I'm not entirely satisfied with the result. Even though is matches the print rather well, I'm disappointed that I couldn't get it better than that.