The Austringer

I haven’t got the bucks for a dedicated film scanner, but I do have a good DSLR and a slide copier setup, so I’m experimenting with digitizing some of my negatives using that. One that I ran across is of one of my professors from my undergraduate days at the University of Florida, Dr. Frank J. Maturo. Prof. Maturo taught a variety of courses on invertebrate zoology, and I took all I could fit into my schedule.

This picture was taken on an invertebrate zoology field trip either in 1981 or 1982. Likely setup would have been a Nikon F2 camera, Nikkor 24mm f/2.8 AI lens, and Kodak Tri-X Pan film. (Perhaps the student is Sharon Jansky; I’m not certain on that.)

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Because I’m going from a negative to digital, I take special care to get the histogram centered in the review display. A black and white negative has a compressed scale, so getting the most out of both the highlight and shadow regions is a tricky business. My post-processing in Corel Photo-Paint follows these lines: invert, desaturate, do contrast enhancement to expand the scale to fit, then auto-equalize. That seems to do a reasonable job of rendering a black and white image.

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