scanning holga

I don’t have a darkroom, nor have I ever made darkroom prints, even back in the 70s and 80s, so being able to scan negatives into my ipad in some way is a must. I had a nice Epson flatbed photo scanner, that could do both 35mm and 120mm negatives, but it got sold with all the other film stuff a few years back. It had to be run through a laptop, and then the photos moved to dropbox so that I could access them on the ipad. A couple of years ago I got one of the tiny 35mm scanners that loads the photos onto an SD card, and it works nicely. Scanners for 120mm format are hard to find and more money than I want to spend right now.

The first roll of 120 I shot, I had the camera store also do scans, an extra 8.00. The files are very small, and I was not particularly pleased with the quality. Then I found this little gadget from Kodak for about 35.00.

There is an app that you download to your phone that flips the negative to a positive image, it even has a few editing tools on the menu. It’s a cardboard box with a battery operated square plastic light-box, that’s it. It only works for 6×6 or square format negatives, so it is quite limited. It is also dependent on the quality of the camera on your phone. Fortunately I had just upgraded my phone to an iphone 12 mini, which has a far superior camera than the one I had. I have been practicing with it on some of my old 120 negatives shot on a Holga plastic camera, and I am most happy with the results. Here are some I’ve done.

Developing stuff is on the way, so I am about to be relatively self sufficient in processing my film.

Cheers!