The Electrical Engineer

  History If you are reading this you probably already know about the iconic look of Kodak Aerochrome film. The iconic false color Infrared film used for Arial photography produced vibrant red/purple images of vegetation. It's origins where for surveillance as artificial structures would stick out. Eventually it made its way into the hands of photographers. A number of album covers allegedly used the film for its surreal colors. The first artist that made me fascinated by the film was Richard Mosse work in the Democratic Republic of Congo.  But if you are like me, between the difficulty and expense of purchasing and using it, I never was able to shoot the real thing. The Basics The best place to start when trying to replicate something ourselves is to take a look at the orginal. Luckily we can view the datasheet  to understand what is happening. On the first page Figure 1. Provides the best information for how the false colors work showing how the different layers are exp...

  As I've been revisiting using a Digital Camera as a film scanner, I thought it might be interesting to see if using a Foveon Style sensor would have any advantages. While it only has 25 effective megapixels, for 35mm scans and smaller, the extra color information and sharpness of the foveon sensor should be more than enough under ideal conditions. One note is that the shutter slap on the sdqh isn't great and made getting sharp scans more difficult than a mirrorless with an Eletronic shutter. But what I am interested most in is if the color response would appear to offer any advantage.  For this setup it's more or less the same as my latest venture into film scanning: DSLR SCANNING sdqh with 105mm macro lens While there are three kinds of film I could test, I think slides make for the easiest comparison as they result in an image without any additional processing to compensate for the color base or being inverted. Because of the greater shadow noise of the sdqh at the same...

If you shoot film, the worst part of the entire process has to be getting the images into a computer. While there might still be some purists who preserve a completely analogue workflow between capture, development, print.  I respect people who do that, as it's becoming a much rarer art form itself. Most people these days want their photos to exist on a computer to edit and/or share. There are a few options to accomplish this, but the traditional method was to scan with a dedicated scanner. And scanning is its own entire subject with its own considerations separate from simply taking the photo. There is an entire process you have to learn for any given scanner to get results you can be happy with. I actually put together a short piece on that about a decade ago on my minor annoyance with people comparing scanners more-so then the film: Mindful of Film Scanning Which to bring this all back around is to say, scanning and scanners are really annoying, fiddly, and generally the worst s...