Holga Scans: Commercial vs. DIY

I just returned from the lab with a set of prints from the Holga 120FN. It was nice to put it to some real use, rather than just experimental. And at this point I feel like putting the digitals away for a while and concentrating on film with the Holga.

I’ve been working with Imaging Coliseum on 39th Street in NYC, and they’ve really been coming through for me. They know film, and offer a full range of services for creative photographers, such as cross-processing. They’ll process your film exactly as you ask them to. I went all out on this roll, ordering both prints and a CD. Sadly, on my way home I stopped off at a client and accidentally left the CD behind, so when I got back to the studio, all I had was the prints and the film. They say things happen for a reason, and this forced me to scan in every frame of film on the Epson V500. Had this not happened, I might easily have defaulted to the standard, lo-res machine scans.

If anything can be said for the Epson V500, it’s that its forté is 120 film. It’s easily able to resolve fine detail when working in medium format. In thumbnail mode, it will detect and automatically crop 6x4.5, 6x6, 6x7 and 6x9 formats, and you can scan up to 6x12cm in non-thumbnail mode for the Holga 120WPC. In a pinch, you can even scan each half of a 4x5, and stitch it together manually or with Adobe Photomerge. With the transparency mask removed, you can scan an area of 2.7" x 9.3" (6.9cm x 23.6cm). So you can overlap multiple exposures to create one long continuous negative and scan it intact.

When scanning reflective art, I usually set the levels manually. But with color negative film, you’ve no choice but to use the automatic exposure mode, which fortunately works quite well. I use the Digital Ice feature to remove dust and scratches, and it definitely makes clean-up go a lot faster.

With a square composition, it’s easy to specify the target width (or height) as 4,000 pixels, and let the other dimension fly, as long as it’s over 4,000px. Then, if you like, you can crop it down to exactly 4000 x 4000 for a 16MP image. Of course, you could also go 6000 x 6000 for a 36MP image. The choice is yours. The scans are far superior to the standard 1024x1024 scans from the Noritsu. Higher resolution scans are available, but they’e quite expensive. So, this was a test to be able to make a valid comparison between the machine scans, the prints, and my scans. In the future, I’ll just have the film processed and do the scanning myself.

ISO 400 is definitely the film to use on an unmodified Holga 120S, 120FN, or 120CFN. It has great latitude, and creates nice, dense negatives which scan easily. In low light, the flash of the 120FN works quite well in group shots with the default aperture. With ISO 100 film, the images would be two stops darker, and underexposure is never a good thing with film. So, this may prompt me to modify the “sunny” aperture to f/10 (right now that’s the “cloudy/flash” aperture) and make the cloudy/flash aperture f/8, which is exactly as the camera is meant to be. This way, I could use slower film with cloudy aperture if need be. This seems to be a much more sensible approach.