Post your best current shots

[Steve U]

Hi Denise, I played around with the contrast a little, hope you don't mind. I wouldn't worry about the noise, you can get away with more noise and call it grain in B&W, in my opinion. Some of those film noir presets look very good on your image as well. Very inspiring image.

[DLS]

Looks great Denise, nice work.

Steve, nice re-do. Both look great.

[ddt0725]

Steve, I don't mind at all! It is exactly the effect I was looking for. I tried a similar preset in NIK Silver.

This is a different photo I tried today in Topaz. I like the one you did better!


IMG_4436_BW by Denise Trocio, on Flickr

[cls]

Hi, I had some spare time for photography this weekend, but yesterday was overcast, rainy and dark. Instead I spent some hours taking photos of around 200 old negatives. I have tried this once before, but at that time I wasn't very careful and also I didn't have a macro lens. The result back then was quite poor. Yesterday put some more effort in: I was careful with aligning, lighting and focusing. I used my new macro lens but didn't get too close. I wanted some extra DOF and also some margin for placing the negatives.

The result was a lot better than last time. Of course, the images can't be compared to the 7D IQ, but they should be acceptable for small/medium format prints. (And what I'm really after is digitizing of the images, prints can of course me made from the negatives.)

So, one of my recent shots would be this one:


After some post processing it turns into an image similar (but levelled and distortion corrected) to the old print in my album:


(The shot is kind of recent and almost 15 years old at the same time.)

[Rocco]

That's damn decent! I've never heard of anyone digitizing old negatives that way. I'm assuming it was backlit somehow?

[rlriii13]

Merry Christmas, from my family to yours.

[Rocco]

Ha! I love it!

[cls]

That's damn decent! I've never heard of anyone digitizing old negatives that way. I'm assuming it was backlit somehow?

The principle is basically the same as scanning (but the usual scanner needs more than 1/160 sec to scan a negative). I've read quite a lot about this method and the big guys use special rigs for the camera and light boards to place the negatives on. I set up a simple DIY arrangement with a carefully levelled plastic board (the same one as you've seen a couple of glasses on), lit from below by a speedlite. The camera was on tripod from above and also carefully levelled.

It takes some time to tweak a LR/ACR preset that gives a nice result, but then I just apply it to the whole batch. Some individual fine tuning and cropping is also required to get the final result.

[conropl]

Merry Christmas, from my family to yours.

Thank you, and I hope your lovely family have a great Christmas as well. Christmas is always fun with little ones in the house... so it looks like you should enjoy it. That is a great shot.

Hi, I had some spare time for photography this weekend, but yesterday was overcast, rainy and dark. Instead I spent some hours taking photos of around 200 old negatives. I have tried this once before, but at that time I wasn't very careful and also I didn't have a macro lens. The result back then was quite poor. Yesterday put some more effort in: I was careful with aligning, lighting and focusing. I used my new macro lens but didn't get too close. I wanted some extra DOF and also some margin for placing the negatives.

That is neat.

[Kayaker72]

rlriii13...you are training your children well.... cute picture.

CLS...that is very cool. One of my winter projects is to figure out how to "digitize" old photos from my Dad's side of the family. I am going to try to scan them again (I bought a Canoscan 8600 a few years ago) but my other thought had been to use a macro lens and photograph them. Glad to see it works pretty well.