Rob. Works + Thoughts

Photowalk at the Athens, Greece airport. I need to go on more photowalks.

Lauren recently posted several polaroids that we took while in Greece. They were some of the first scans to go through our new scanner and I really didn’t have any idea what I was doing. I’m been tinkering today trying to figure out the best settings and I think I’ve settled on something I’m happy with. The first problem I faced was what resolution to scan at. The scanner is capable of 9600 DPI, but when a polaroid is scanned at that resolution in 48bit color mode, the files are larger than 10gb each! (Thats right 10GB!). Obviously I don’t need (nor could my computer ever handle) a 10gb file for a polaroid, and to be honest that resolution is really reserved for negatives/positives. Right now I’m scanning each polaroid to a file size of 250mb (1600dpi) and then resizing for web. I think thats larger than whan is necessary, but I’m just getting started and I love zooming in and seeing all the detail present in these Artistic TZ polaroids. Another problem I faced today was what philosophy to have when it comes to color correction. Polaroid is decidely (and beautfully) lo-fi and I feel I would be doing it a diservice to make contrast and brightness adjustments at the scanner level. Therefore for polaroids I’ve decided to do the least amount of adjustments possible. As long as the color closely resembles what I see on the polaroid then I’m happy. 35mm and large format film will be a more diffiult beast to tame. Since I’m relatively new to film, I still end up making dumb mistakes and as such I don’t mind tweaking things a bit more at the scanner level.

So this is a rescan of an Artistic TZ polaroid that was already posted at robandlauren.ca - you can follow that link to take you to the exact post.

You’ll notice that the color is not as vibrant- but that’s what polaroid is like! You’ll also notice that I’m scanning it against a piece of white mat board so that I get a bit of a drop shadow around the polaroid. Please leave any suggestions you might have on scanning polaroids in the comments.

In January and February we’ll be spending a month in Peru. I’m going to be challenging myself to take a lot more photos of people, and most definitely less empty chairs.

Zeiss Ikon, Planar 50/2 f/5.6, 1/1000 Fuji Provia 100 pushed to 400.

A couple days ago our large format scanner arrived (a Microtek M1 pro for those interested). Scanning in itself is an art form that will take some practice. For now check out these first couple scans.

The shot above was one of the first shots taken with our 4x5 Horseman LE. The shot below is of Lauren in Greece on our wedding.

I obviously still have a lot to learn about shooting 4x5, but having a scanner will make things a lot more fun! One of the really cool things about this scanner is that negatives/positives are inserted right into the scanner (not scanned through any glass). This results in a higher quality scan without newton rings. A special thanks to Klyment Tan for helping me choose the right scanner.

P.S. Check out Robandlauren.ca for scans of some sweet polaroids we took while in Greece.

A couple iPhone snaps from today while I waited for the library to open. If you’re interested in iPhone photography check out the free Mill Colour app. It’s what I use to process all my iPhone photos.