Tuesday, January 24, 2012

A Negative Experiment ...

So ... how many of us have negatives ...
I know I have a whole file folder full!
I've always wanted to have them developed, to replace so many of my pictures that were ruined when the roof leaked ...
The process is something I've had to put on hold, due to lack of funding for this project.

Then I had an inspiration!!!

I cut down an old soda box, cut a small square hole in the front, and taped on a small piece of cardboard to each side of the hole to hold the negative in place.

The negative slipped right in!
I set the gizmo in front of a lamp, but the lighting was too strong.
So I diffused the light with a piece of white paper taped to another box behind ...
I propped my camera up on a pile of books, set it on "Macro" about an inch from the negative, focused my camera ...
"Click"!

And took a picture of the negative!
(Sorry about the cat hairs, this is a re-take of the shot - the original didn't have the hairs).

I used "Gimp" (colors/invert) to make the negative a positive ...

Then played with the colors and levels.
It's not the best, but I will keep trying!

In the meantime, this is a photo of my mom, my brother and his wife ... that I haven't seen in years - and probably would never have seen again!

4 comments:

Beth Niquette said...

Sissy--you are just incredible. I can't believe it--I have a scanner which does such things--but I think you've had even better results.

You, my darling Sister, are a genius! You'd better copyright your idea, you know!

Five and Diamond said...

Wow- Great idea- I can't wait to try this!

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Al said...

That is a good idea! If you've got large numbers to convert, there are plenty of inexpensive scanners that will do the job too. Mine will automatically scan and convert a whole strip of negatives at once (or four slides), and it was around $100 a couple of years ago.