My brand new digitizing workflow using a 25 year old film scanner - Vlado Vince
Photography is arguably my oldest hobby. I’ve loved taking photos for as long as I can remember. I reflected on my first encounter with digital photography in 2003 in a recent post, but I’m old enough that I first got to know photography through film. I still don’t know what it is exactly that draws me to still images, but I find the same joy capturing light with a camera as I did 30 years ago.
I first got serious about photography when I started high school. I got my first SLR camera, a Canon EOS 3000v, in 2006. Over the next few years I used it to shoot countless rolls of film. Many were the then-ubiquitous and cheap types like Kodak Gold, which I would process at a local photo studio. Even though I was shooting film, the digital writing was already on the wall, so I would have the studio scan the photos for me and burn them on a CD. I still have dozens of disks with scanned images from those days.
In 2008 I took a course on developing photos in a darkroom. This opened a whole new world for me, and from this point on I developed a lasting love for personally controlling the whole process, from selecting the camera and film, taking the photo, to developing the film and then making a print. Soon after I built my own darkroom at home, using an enlarger from Czechoslovakia that I found on the street. At this time my preferred film was Efke KB100. I still love the classic looking style of this black and white film, but back then I used it for a very simple reason – Efke film was produced in a small town called Samobor, just outside of Zagreb, and it was widely available for cheap. Fotokemika, the company that made Efke film, shut down a few years later. I wrote a brief reflection on my experience shooting their film when I came across some long forgotten Efke infrared stock.
