My parents have some prints, but they are mostly in sad shape and/or in albums with that sticky cling film holding them in place. If I go taking the prints out to scan them, it will take about 2 minutes per print, and then I'll have destroyed a photo album, so I'll have to buy new albums and assemble them.

I'm looking for a way to just quickly take a picture of a negative, shift the negative slightly, and take the next one. I'm hoping for about 5 seconds between taking each picture, and around 30 seconds to process each image.

It's all about speed, otherwise this is going to take forever and will never happen.

So I need to refine the system. But my test proves it's possible. I wasn't sure you could take a picture of a negative and eventually get a positive.

Glatt, I realize you plan to go the DIY and less expensive route,
but if you decide to pay-for-play, the ScanCafe.com has been very good for us with 35 mm slides.
They are currently running a year-end special for $0.21 each on "standard media",
so I assume that would include your 110 negatives.

Here is the website, and the discount code (for today's discount only) is 2010END.
If you don't use it today, just get on their email list and you'll get notices every week of new discounts.

We did over 1300 35mm slides with them from our first 30 yrs of snapshots, when our kids were young.
The great thing about this company is that you send them your materials,
they scan and post on the internet, you review and select only the ones you want.
You can reject up to 50% without penalty, and pay only for the ones you select.
They return everything + a DVD with your selection.

hello glatt--

Speaking as the dwellar least resistant to the DIY urge, I second Lamplighter's advice to do this project using a credit card instead of duct tape and bailing wire. Your fear that it will be too slow and cumbersome to actually complete is valid and you should heed it.

Having said that, here are some links for you:

GIMP scripts, where to get them and how to install them.

some scripts related to inversion

Negative photo scanner

Printing negatives

...ok... Now I have to indulge my inner mad tinkerer.

Your 110 negatives come in a strip, no? And all were taken using the same exposure settings, maybe? Why not use your very same process to photograph more than one exposure at a time? The pressure is to get them into the camera, and you can invert/balance a bunch at a time. In one step you've increased your production rate by 100 or 200 or 300 percent or more.

As for the prints in albums, you can do the same thing. I've faced this problem myself, though I'm too chicken to undertake digitization of my negatives. Just scan the whole page. Then in the editor, you can cut out each individual image.

I hear a potential complaint that by using one camera/scanner image to capture multiple images reduces the net resolution of each image. True. But perhaps unimportant for most of these images. How will these digitized images be enjoyed? For most of my images, just a *fraction* of my camera's full frame resolution would be adequate. Most of my images would be fine at 4x6 or 5x7 printed size, and though I don't know the math off the top of my head, one zillion pixel digital frame could easily deliver, say, four images. Voila! A fourfold increase in production.

Good luck. Don't forget to value your time here. The enjoyment of the images, not the manipulation of the negatives is more important for me.

I appreciate your post, and I also recognize your advice to pay someone to do it as being pretty sound. But I'm also stubborn and cheap.

I have invented a method in my mind that will reduce the picture taking time to a couple of seconds per image, plus the time to load each negative strip of 4-5 images. Loading the strip will take about 15 seconds.

The real time consumer will be the color adjustment in GIMP. I did half a dozen more image tests over the weekend, and can now do one image in about a minute. Still longer than I want, but it's getting better. I'm recreating scanner speeds now. I'm going to play around with your link and see if I can make a tool in GIMP that will speed things up.

My plan is to use my LCD monitor as a consistent light source. I'm going to make a holder for a sheet of glass a few inches in front of the monitor. The idea is that I can slide this whole large sheet of glass sandwich back and forth in the holder so the camera can stay still on a tripod and keep a fixed zoom and fixed focus.

I think taking a picture of each image individually will ultimately be faster than digitally selecting and saving the individual images in GIMP. So that another reason to do it this way.

Gimp should have a white balance tool. PS does in curves. Find the tool, click it on the orange border, then invert colors. The orange border should become white when you clcik it, then black when you invert colors. The appropriate amount of orange should be removed from the other areas of your photo.

Ooh, that looks like it works. Cuts out a few steps too. Nice!

Crazt.

Crazt,
Crazt for feeling so lonelt
I'm crazt,
Crazt for feeling so blue...

:p:

Sonic, from KFC, about two blocks away.

:eek:It got much worse as the day went on. Attachment 30590

Ice storms are the worst. Cool picture though!

This is a negative that I imaged over the weekend. This process is working fairly well. I have cut the total processing time per image down to around 30 seconds.

Anyway, I think this is a fun picture. I'm the kid in the red and blue tank top. At this zoo in Tuscon, they had the tortoises in a petting zoo kind of area, where you could play with them. We dragged all of them out of the little cave in the background, lined them all up and made them race. Some were faster than others, and for those that were slow, we tried cheering them on. When that didn't work, you can see that I'm knocking on their shells to get them to move. My sister next to me is too.

There was nobody from the zoo there to supervise, and my parents thought our behavior was fine. It may have even been their idea. You could never get away with doing this today. Manhandling the animals!

Now I want to build a concrete and sand turtle habitat. I wonder how they do at 20 below.

With ice.

And sand.

Well at least you don't have to walk far to get some dinner.:D