When I started out in photography I was a film photographer. I had no choice. Back in the 1980’s there was no such thing as digital photography. At least not to the masses. I was a dedicated film photographer all through the 80’s, 90’s and part of the early 2000’s. For the past 10 years I have consistently used digital tools to realize my photographic vision.

Early on in the transformation to digital technology a lot of activity was dedicated to digitizing film. In my early publishing career, the magazine I worked for went from a film workflow to a digital workflow which involved putting multiple pieces of film  on a huge flatbed scanner made by a company called Heidelberg. Each film scan took 15 minutes and up to an hour for large formats. Luckily film scanners became smaller and more affordable.

One of the best consumer level film scanner was the Nikon Super Coolscan LS 9000. It stopped being supported sometime in 2016 by Nikon. You can’t buy one for less than twice what they originally went for new! It’s coveted by cultural heritage institutions that still have large collections of film based material need conversion to digital.

So when I heard our IT department came upon several of these Nikon scanners in some now defunct library department I had to assert my role as Head of Digital Imaging to take those machines to safe keeping. The machines were tested and put into production in the Digital Imaging Lab.

I have one in my office, and after testing and calibrating I decided to scan a landscape image from my collection of landscape transparencies. I used to be a contributor to the Bruce Coleman Stock agency that specialized in Nature imagery. The image is a panorama made up of 4 film frames (6.45 format – remember that?). I may print it just to see how it stands up to my current efforts at a series of landscape images.