Holga experiment

In my last Holga post I mentioned that you could step up the DIY by scanning your own negatives without investing in an expensive film scanner. GoHolga has a brief tutorial on how to do this with b&w negatives. Last weekend for Mathieu‘s 30th birthday we rented a little studio on Hornby Island and, as usual, we took a lot of photos. I experimented with my Holga and took two rolls of 120 colour film. When we got home, I was eager to see the results, so I tried the flatbed trick with my colour film just for fun. The results were interesting, though not nearly high-quality enough. It is a great way to preview shots to decide which to digitize. I will be processing the colour slides to do the photos justice, but for now I will share the process and the resulting nostalgic b&w images.

This is what the unaltered scan looks like:

unaltered 120 negative flatbed scan

Next, in Photoshop, I desaturated and inverted the image then adjusted the brightness and contrast before cropping each frame. Here are some of the results:

30th birthday triptych

Arbutus at Helliwell Provincial Park

Hornby Teepee

I posted a few more on my Flickr site.

Remember, this is supposed to work well with b&w film and this time I was scanning colour film.

Have you tried this technique? Do you know of any other inexpensive and creative alternatives for developing, processing or scanning film? We would love to hear about them and see the results!