The Plastic Lens ~ Words » sprockets

Scanning For Sprockets [Revisited]

Cameron — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 05:16:14 +0000

A while back I tried to explain how to get sprockets holes from your toy camera negatives scanned to a digital file correctly. My text and images where not entirely the best method to explain it so now finally I have produced a long overdue tutorial on how to use your scanner software to scan in 35mm negative film to include the sprocket holes. This is relevant when you are using toy cameras like the blackbird,fly or have a Holga or Diana modified to take 35mm film (or if you have a 35mm back to fit these cameras) for example.
I’m using a Canoscan 8400f to scan my negatives, but hopefully there will be some common points of reference if you are using a different scanner and/or different software. *note: You may be able to see what I’m doing better by going to the full screen view.

Some more photos back from Tokyo

Cameron — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 12:35:37 +0000

For those who have been trying to access the site and been getting a “server not responding” message (as I have for the last few hours) – my apologies. I have requested some sort of explanation from my host for this and other buggy behaviour I’ve been experiencing lately.
Back to business. The bbf website has been updated with lots of cool stuff including a gallery ~ most of the text is in Japanese of course, but I did note that it looked like there was going to be an option for an English version in the future – why else would they have a small tag on the home page saying Japanese (which is pretty obvious, looking at the site) except to offer the choice for other languages further down the track?
True to their wonderful nature, Powershovel sent some prints from the recent set of film I took for them. I got some of my photos back from Tokyo today. The only disappointment is that the over 30% of exposures I took with no mask in the BBF (exposure to the sprockets) were not printed as such, obviously the lab Powershovel used in Japan couldn’t handle that… but not to worry, when I eventually get the negatives I can scan them myself. (Responsive as ever, one of the people at Powershovel read about the lack of sprocket holes on my flickr photos and emailed me a promise to send the negs to me as soon as their art director was done with them) – they really are that nice to work with.

360 photos

Cameron — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 20:33:22 +0000

My mission is to try and shoot 360 photos in 14 days (well the little piece of paper said 7 days, but I let them know that I couldn’t possibly manage that in between family commitments and other essential things like going to work, sleeping and eating) I have already taken two rolls worth of Agfa 400 asa 36 exposure rolls of 35mm film through the BBF for Superheadz which leaves… um, let me see… 288! No worries! Gee I’m glad I’ve got a couple of days off coming up! When I first got my nice cameras from Superheadz however, I did manage to load one of them with one of my own rolls to make sure my second personal roll from the original prototype was mainly fuzzy due to my mistakenly leaving it on “b” for most of the time. Which it was (surprise, surprise)! Click on the image of my eldest with the blue blackbird, fly to enlarge it (and see more from my first personal roll from the *new* bbf if you have javascript enabled) For the next few days I think I’ll be shooting film for Tokyo…