Lens: Minolta 50mm f1.4 AF
Camera: NEX-7, ISO100, f5.6, 1/125, raw
You won’t remember, but I spent the 18th of February “scanning” the 144 slides from the 4 rolls of Fujifilm Provia 400 I shot at Edoardo’s Bachelor Party. In that date I’ve also told you how my scanning process is based on shooting each backlighted slide with a digital camera and a macro lens. Other than that, my setup is composed of a light table, a tripod, and an external shutter release. And clean slides. This can sound rather obvious, but it’s actually tricky to keep slides clean, they seem to attract dust and hair like nothing else on Earth. So, after I spent most of the 18th of February “scanning” my slides, I realized that more than a few were too dirty to be used.
So, yesterday I finally reshoot them. This time, however, I used the NEX-7 as digital camera (last time I couldn’t because Aperture was not compatible yet with the raw files). This little change made the procedure extremely easier, especially once I added to the setup an external monitor. Connecting the NEX-7 to the 19″ monitor via HDMI, in fact, made it possible to quickly position the slide at the center of the frame, finely focus on the film, and easily check for the presence of any dirt on its surface. Everything went so smooth that I ended up re-scanning all of the 144 slides.
The rest of the day was dedicated to the production of a photo-book. I use Blurb for editing, printing, and publishing all of my photo-books, and if you don’t know it yet please check it out immediately, it’s great. My plan is to share the book with the other participants to the bachelor party. We are all from the same neighborhood in Rome and we know each other at least since high-school, but life scattered us all around the globe and there are now very few occasions in which we happen to be all together.