Leslie Wyatt
Film Photography
Over the years I have used Epson scanners and diligently used the 35mm plastic
slide and negative holding trays provided with the scanner. Moving to medium
format some ten years ago I decided that I needed the Epson V750 Pro scanner
with its fluid mount accessory to scan the 120 slides and black and white
negatives effectively. The slide or negative is sandwiched between the fluid
mount glass platen and a sheet of mylar film using scanning fluid. This not
only keeps the negative flat under surface tension but also maintains a high
quality optical path. But for some unaccountable reason I continued to use the
plastic mounting trays for 35mm film.
In a moment of enlightenment I wondered why I didn’t wet scan the 35mm film
and have my slides processed without mounts. So, after scanning the slide in
its mount I broke open the mount and wet scanned the film directly. Well, as
you can see from the images I was amazed and quite shocked by the increase in
sharpness. What have I been doing to all my 35mm images over the years! The
images are a cropped version of a photograph taken of a fishing boat in Looe
harbour in Cornwall. Taken on a Pentax ME Super with Fuji Provia 100.
So, from now on I shall wet scan everything!
But hold on! It's not all perfection. Scanning colour positives ( slides ) and
black and white negatives do seem to benefit from wet scanning. But scanning 35mm
colour negative film is a slightly different matter. Because colour negative film
has a coloured base layer wet scans are often subject to flare from the sprocket
holes ( see below ). So, provided you don't need the whole frame you can crop this
away. You could revert using the negative holding tray which masks the sprocket
holes and then perform an unsharp mask process in your chosen processing software.
But I think wet scanning has the edge ( excuse the pun! )
