Low tech "scanning"

This was an attempt to see what a cheap digital camera and a plastic

loupe would do in copying a negative. The negative was a not-bad shot

in a Nikon APS slr a couple of years ago. It had limitations to begin

with -- it was on expired FNAC film, a film notorious for its lack of

clarity. Nonetheless, this image wasn't bad in the original.



I taped the negative (still in its plastic PrintFile sleeve) to a

sheet of white paper which I taped to a north-facing window. The north

window was chosen to avoid the sunlight that is streaming in the

south-facing ones this morning. The texture in the image is largely

the fibre patterning in the paper but probably has something to do

with the plastic sleeve, too. I set the Olympus Camedia C3020 to its

flower icon, meaning it was looking for close focus, and I simply held

my little Agfa plastic loupe (8x) on the front of the camera's lens.

With the flash turned off, I took this picture. Done that way I could

hold the camera fairly steady for its 1/20 second exposure. I did

very little in adjustment -- in Paint Shop Pro, I inverted the image

colours and then adjusted the colour curves a little bit.



Adjusting the loupe-to-lens distance (to gve bigger coverage of the

negative), using a better negative to begin with, and using a less

fibrous paper backing (or a proper light table) would all improve this

result, if by "improvement" you mean making the image look more like

something you'd taken originally in the same digital camera. But I

like the introduction of shape distortion (pin-cushion distortion?),

the textural quality, and the circular image.