Scanning 35mm Film

I bought myself a little present.   A 35mm film scanner.   It’s not the fanciest thing or the most expensive but it will do the trick.   And, most importantly, it will bring some of my 35mm projects of the past to the light of day in the digital world.

Here’s a look at it:

It is a DBTech 35mm film slide and negative scanner, 10 mega pixel.   I grabbed it on Amazon for $69.99 and am pretty happy with the results from my first scans.   It is super easy to use and has a digital screen so you can see what you are doing.   Bonus, you don’t have to be hooked up to the computer and you can add memory to it.    No additional software, it’s just a simple camera and save.  Then, you use a UBS to save it to your computer and can edit it however you want.   I like simple.  Two thumbs up for this one!

Of course, I scanned one of my most favorite sets of film.   I will do a full blog post about these images but wanted to focus on just the scanner for today.    And, why I think it is important to save your film to digital.

I love the “vintage” look  and I’m all about filters that do that trick on Instagram.   So, seeing this pictures is fun.   But, there are scratches and fading that happen over time.    So, get to preserving people!   It doesn’t take long.   These photos were taken in 1997.

I took the photos with my Nikon FM2.   All manual, no fancy nothing.   I love that camera.    My skills have changed since 1997 but I still love this set.   It was a great experience at the museum to watch this monk build a sand mandala and it was a great experience learning that camera.   The focus isn’t perfect and there were some challenges for lighting in the museum but I think the scanning came out pretty good.   Stay tuned for another post with the rest of the pictures and more information about the sand mandala process.

Do you have any old film that you need to get scanned?