A couple days ago I had the chance to develop some black and white negatives. Of course I jumped at the opportunity and was quite excited to smell the familiar smells of the developing chemicals and to feel the wonderful feeling of developing your own photos. Then I realized that I had no way of scanning them once I had these beautiful negatives. Thus, Ghetto Scanning.
If you ever find yourself in a similarly desperate situation: lacking a decent negative scanner, but you have yourself a crappy P&S digital (or a fancy DSLR), give Ghetto Scanning a try. You might be pleasantly surprised.
The process is quite simple:
*Hold your negatives up to a light source, preferably one with a neutral background. Clothes pins or a friend (read: Ghetto Scanning assistant) can really help here.
*Take a digital photo of your negative. Try to keep the negative as flat as possible and make it fill the frame of the digital camera as much as possible.
*Import the digital photos and invert/crop them in Photoshop or Gimp or whatever you use to edit photos. You’ll also want to play with the levels a bit to get it looking just right.
**extra points if you white balance your camera first, or if you want a blue or yellow tint then don’t!
Me and my Ghetto Scan light source My Ghetto Scanning light source and I:
The results are actually quite fantastic. Depending on your light source you might get some glowy cool effects which you can either minimize or maximize when you edit the photos later. Here are a few examples from the first roll I Ghetto Scanned:
So now it’s time to try it for yourself. Leave a comment and say how it’s worked out for you. All you Tumblr-folk, leave a photo reply with your results :)
Happy scanning. :)
