Drum scanning is crazy time consuming and expensive. I shoot hundreds (sometimes thousands) of film photos per year and 99.999% of my scanning is done with a camera and a backlight.
Cross polarised light (to eliminate specular reflection) and a home made vacuum bed is 99% of the way to a seriously pro scanning tool.
A setup like that helped me get through 15k prints in no time with excellent results. The biggest barrier to success was after churning through the 7x5 and 6x4 shots, things got a lot harder with variable sizes of print. It really slowed the process down — and conversely, uniform print sizes made the first 90% of the job almost enjoyable. I averaged one “scan” every 2s.
Not OP, but any macro lens will do the job. You're not likely to be shooting at a wider aperture than f8 given that you'll need some depth of field to spare. (Even if you use a specialised copy lens with a flat field, the film won't be perfectly flat anyway.) So given that you're shooting an imperfectly flat piece of film at a narrow aperture, differences between lenses will be small. I use an ancient f3.5 Micro-Nikkor. These are cheap and plentiful in the second hand market and can be adapted for most cameras.
As far as the camera is concerned, it's a big advantage to have an electronic shutter. The effects of camera shake are magnified with macro photography, and a mechanical shutter can make the results observably softer. I am cheap, so I use an old DSLR in T mode and use a Raspberry Pi to turn on one of those backlit sketch pads for a fraction of a second to expose the image.
gorgoiler|1 year ago
A setup like that helped me get through 15k prints in no time with excellent results. The biggest barrier to success was after churning through the 7x5 and 6x4 shots, things got a lot harder with variable sizes of print. It really slowed the process down — and conversely, uniform print sizes made the first 90% of the job almost enjoyable. I averaged one “scan” every 2s.
aphrax|1 year ago
foldr|1 year ago
As far as the camera is concerned, it's a big advantage to have an electronic shutter. The effects of camera shake are magnified with macro photography, and a mechanical shutter can make the results observably softer. I am cheap, so I use an old DSLR in T mode and use a Raspberry Pi to turn on one of those backlit sketch pads for a fraction of a second to expose the image.