Your Best Foot Forward - Part One

Followed by your second-best foot. And a hint: keep 'em moving. If you slow down the wolves get you. I have been engaged in learning a painful lesson these last few days. You can profit from it, and you needn't wince. Like a lot of film-era photographers, I accumulated books and boxes of negatives and slides. They were printed or projected in their time but have been relegated in the last decade or so as the digital files stocks have mounted. There was a time when I was shooting film and digitising the results with a scanner - before I got the first DSLR. It was a laborious process, but quite successful - particularly when the feed images came form top-quality cameras and lenses. I fought dust and scratches with Photoshop Elements and in general was chuffed with the results. Now I have no more film cameras - but the older results are sitting there begging to be re-seen. I started to look last Saturday. Unfortunately I fell foul of my tendency to look for the laziest solution. I started to re-photograph the negatives. This was not hard - my Fujifilm mirror-less camera could be bolted to a home-made copy stand to see a negative spread out on a light box. The macro lens focussed well and the AE mechanism threw up a negative file that was quite decent. I could put it into Lightroom or Photoshop CC 2019 and flip the blacks and whites - I could also flip colour negatives. But that was the start of a weekend of frustration - trying to obtain a colour balance that would never be there. Trying to chase out rogue hues and intensities with controls that were largely reversed. And eventually lying to myself that I had done a good job. I do a good job of lying to myself at the end of an exhausting day... There are a number of YouTube presenters who show you how to rephotograph your film results - and a even proprietary plug-ins that they insist make everything look good. You can go part of the way yourself with things you can find in the shed...but the foot you are putting forward may not be either the best or second-best. However, there is an answer - read Part Two on Monday.