On 10/8/2009 11:17 AM Lawrence Akutagawa spake thus:

wrote in message
...

On Thu, 8 Oct 2009 07:06:36 -0700, "Lawrence
Akutagawa" wrote:

"laran" wrote in message
...

Am looking to buy a film scanner to make contact prints mainly.
Needs to be inexpensive, run on linux and also do slides to a
reasonable quality.
Ideas?????

Now why in the world would someone be using a film scanner in the
darkroom? hmmm...contact prints are created by keeping the
negatives in contact, as it were, with the photo sensitive paper.
How does the film scanner come into play during this process?
Care to explain?

I think it's fair to say I've replaced my contact sheets with scans
of my negatives. I call them contact sheets or contacts, but they
don't exist on paper.

I was always lazy about making contacts of my processed films.
Years would go by before I got a look at lots of the things I did.
The dread of hours of darkroom labor to make the piles of contacts
I had yet to do kept me from even starting.

So when I finally got a scanner with a light in the lid, I could
just slap my negs down on the glass still in their expensive
PrintFile plastic sleeve. A whole roll of 35 mm or 120 format could
be scanned at one go, and the resulting file was big enough that
each frame could be enlarged on screen (sorry, wrong lingo, they
could be ZOOMED!). This way I find it very easy to judge a portrait
in terms of facial expression and desired cropping of the image.
These are two very important factors for me, neither of which was
ever properly satisfied by a paper contact print.

Interesting discussion, but no explanation of how the scanner is used
in the process of creating contact sheets in the darkroom...the
darkroom, I do believe, is the context of this newsgroup. Alternate
processes such as that forwarded by Lloyd's response here can well be
discussed in other more appropriate newsgroups, such as they are. So
how exactly is the scanner used in the darkroom to create those
paper contact sheets? Just curious.

Methinks you're being a bit overly pendantic here. If the OP were to say
that they wanted to use a film scanner as part of their darkroom
*workflow*, that would be fine by me.

By the way, Lloyd: why do you write messages with such short lines?
Makes your posts unnecessarily long.


--
Found--the gene that causes belief in genetic determinism