[Don’s Issue 26 Editorial] There is a soft burr-ing noise in the background as I write this. It sounds like a pixie with a pixie-sized jack hammer is chewing through soft coal a metre or so beneath my office floor. But in fact the sotto voce murmer is being produced by Nikon’s hefty Coolscan 9000 ED negative and transparency scanner as it digitises a few slides and negatives from my collection. And the reason it’s in my office? Well, I had in mind doing an informal review of it from the perspective of a photographer who has a huge backlog of slides.

 

[Don’s Issue 26 Editorial] There is a soft burr-ing noise in the background as I write this. It sounds like a pixie with a pixie-sized jack hammer is chewing through soft coal a metre or so beneath my office floor. But in fact the sotto voce murmer is being produced by Nikon’s hefty Coolscan 9000 ED negative and transparency scanner as it digitises a few slides and negatives from my collection. And the reason it’s in my office? Well, I had in mind doing an informal review of it from the perspective of a photographer who has a huge backlog of slides.

Like everybody else who’s been taking pictures in a serious way for several decades, I face the digitalisation dilemma. I have hundreds, if not thousands of images on slide and negative film that I’d like to have in digital form, but a scanner that is going to give me the professional results I want could easily cost the better part of $5000. On the other hand, if I opt to have a scanning service process my work, the per scan charge is likely to range from a low of $1 to $4 or more per 35mm slide or negative. My 120 film originals could easily run to twice that amount for each frame.

On the raw numbers, it would appear that so long as I keep the number of scans to less than around a thousand (or about 10 per cent of my total archive), I’d be in front financially by going with the professionals. And if I price in the time it takes me to do my own scans, the numbers really seem to swing the decision in favour of going to a scanning service provider. Add to that the calibration issues and potential associated costs, and you wonder why anybody would bother to buy a scanner.

Dollars-and-cents calculations are a useful, and arguably indispensible, part of the decision-making process. But pretty obviously, they aren’t the only considerations. Years ago, when I built my own darkroom. It was a modest affair, but because I was shooting on 35, 120 and 4×5 film, the set-up costs were in today’s dollar terms some thousands of dollars. For the amount of picture taking I was doing, it would have been considerably cheaper to have paid a lab to run off the prints I wanted. That wasn’t the point of course. If you enjoy fishing you don’t weigh up the pleasure of the activity by dividing the cost of your equipment by retail value of the number of kilos of fish you’ve landed.

I haven’t taken a photograph on film in close to two years now. But as I scanned a few of my 20-year-old Kodachromes, I began to appreciate anew the special qualities of film. The subtle gradation of tonality, the wonderful sense of light, the way deep shadow and specular highlights can co-exist gracefully in the same image, all of this and more was brought back to me. Will I go back to film? Probably not. But will I leave all my film-based images in their boxes and folders? Definitely not. My digital darkroom will one day have a proper, high end scanner.

Scanning your own work (as opposed to turning the job over to a service) has numerous benefits. If you don’t like a scan, there’s nothing to stop you going back to try something different. You can scan images as and when you need them, so it’s not necessary to winnow through hundreds of slides just to assemble an order large enough to be economical. With a good scanner at hand, there’s no reason not to gradually digitise all one’s images.

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Change is afoot at Photo Review. From this issue (Issue 26) we are moving from bi-monthly to quarterly publication. The magazine and our website at www.photoreview.com.au are becoming ever more tightly integrated. Research has shown that many of you use the web to access the latest news and product reviews and we will therefore be working hard to further extend and improve those areas of Australia’s best photographic website. We’ll still be covering the latest photographic technology in these pages, and we’ll still continue to publish our photographer profiles and portfolios. We believe the medium of the printed page will continue to be the standard by which all photographic presentation continues is judged.