Scanning

So, you've been a photographer for a while. 

You have lots of images stored on this medium:

If you shot negatives, they are in strips of 4 to 6 images, if you shot chromes, you have individually mounted 2x2" slides (assuming 35mm SLRs were your tool of choice).

But, it's a digital world now. How do we make a transition from our old celluloid based images to a digital file? Let's face it, we want that digital file. We can manipulate it with our imaging software, we can upload it to a printing plant, we can e-mail it or FaceBook it to our friends. 

So, we scan it. We may have a pretty good scanner in our home office. I have an all-in-one that makes a pretty good scan. I also have a dedicated photo scanner. Dedicated photo scanners make higher resolution scans. You want the highest resolution to make bigger prints or have more image file to work with. But even the dedicated photo scanners that fall in the price range most of us could afford, still won't give us as big a file of our old film as we can get with our current pictures from our D-SLRs.

That's where scanning service bureaus come in. We clean and package off our old films and a few weeks later, we get a digital file large enough to get serious with. Some outfits scan and send you a fttp link for you to download, others send you a CD, DVD, or even a flash drive of the finished product.

I have some choice older chromes out right now to ScanCafe. I'll post the results and my impressions as soon as they come back. Turn around is not fast. If you've ever scanned your own film, you know that each scan takes a while. Pre and post production work can add significant time. And that's per image. Allow for some downtime.

And then, we won't be loaded down with a bunch of potential art on old technology. Now, we'll have our old faves as a primo digi-file.