khen lim wrote:
> Hi
>
> My dad has a B+W contact print (6x6cm) but he doesn't have the negative.
> He's looking at trying to reproduce it at the highest resolution. This photo
> was captured using the Kodak Brownie. He claims to have tried scanning but
> it's not too good. If we're going to do a direct reprography, using say the
> E-510 (or other DSLR), how do you think we should approach this?
>
I have a family album, the early part of which is full of pics of my
brothers and me that are contact prints from 6x9 and 6x6 negatives. I
also have some 6x6 contact prints from the Brownie Hawkeye I had as a
kid. I have done some work scanning these and some even older prints. I
also have had the benefit of my mother's care in preserving some things.
The contact prints in the early part of the album have the negs
carefully stored behind them.
Although I have not yet started any serious work scanning them for my
brothers and our children and grandchildren, I have done some testing
and come to some preliminary conclusions.
- The films of the time were slow, as were the lenses. There is a fair
amount of motion blur, such that many shots that look pretty good at
contact print size just don't have much more to reveal at larger size.
- The 75 mm Kodak Anastigmat on the 6x9 folder my father had when I was
born and for a few years afterward, together with whatever limitations
the camera had with film flatness and holding the lens square, together
with guesstimate distance settings, conspired to limit the detail in
most of those old pics. There are some pretty good ones, but by later
standards, there are a lot of flaws. There are a lot of blurry pics of
me as a baby and toddler. The number of pics per child went down as
there came to be more of us, but the quality went up. :-)
- Much as I liked my little Brownie, the single speed shutter and
primitive lens meant that there is nothing really to see beyond what is
there in the 6x6 contact prints.
- With the arrival of a Kodak twin lens reflex, with a better taking
lens and true reflex focusing, and most likely, faster films, there is
suddenly more detail to be found in the negatives than in the contact
prints. Up until then, the resolving power of the print emulsion is
capable of retaining pretty much the detail available in the negative,
with perhaps a few exceptions. With the new camera and whatever
improvements in film had occurred, this is no longer the case, a scan of
the negative has more detail than a scan of the print.
- In my experience, Chuck is right, even a quite modest flatbed is
capable of capturing all the detail and tonal range that these old
contact prints hold. That is NOT to say that suitable scanner software
settings and post processing can't vastly improve the visible detail and
overall appearance of some such old images. LCE and Curves can sometimes
work what appears to be magic in revealing detail not apparent on print
or original scan. Other times - well, sometimes there just isn't much there.
My guess is that an old 6x6 contact print from a Brownie may simply not
have much to reveal.
Unless you can get a hold of the special software used by TV forensics
techs. You know, the stuff that can enhance the image from one frame of
a videotape that has been recorded over a couple of thousand times,
taken through a $32 camera with a $3 fixed focus lens in the shade of a
column in a dimly lit parking garage and enhance and enlarge it until
the reflected image a a parking stub reflected in the rear view mirror
can be read.
What a properly functioning and operated scanner can't find at 600 dpi,
isn't going to be there for a camera either.
Moose
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