New Adventures in Scanning

I was a little disappointed in the results from last weekend. Blown highlights and patchy contrasty light across two rolls of Fomapan 100 I had exposed while out in Hintonburg – even though I developed them in two different chemistries that I’ve used to pleasing results before.

It turns out that while the Kodak Plus-X preset in SilverFast would seem a suitable stand-in for Fomapan 100 (as very traditional 100-ish speed films: SilverFast has no Foma presets), I wound up with everything being way too bright and contrasty. Control was a real challenge!

When scanning a roll of Fomapan 200 recently (a famously fussy stock that I love when it does sing), I read somewhere that many just use the generic monochrome profile and work from it. As luck would have it, this approach works well with Fomapan 100 too.

In the end, there are still frames where I clearly wasn’t able to control for all the runaway highlights. I’m assuming that I’ll develop (*rimshot*) a sense of where this is possible through better agitation and where I’ve just chosen to make a photo in a lighting situation where it’s not really possible.