I've been the owner of an old one for a few days Nikon FM2 and yesterday I was able to pick up my first exposed film. Well: “exposed” is too much to say, because almost all the pictures are hopelessly underexposed. And that, although according to the exposure meter I had always overexposed. Well, obviously the old selenium sensor cannot cope with the light path of a nano-coated “G” lens. But such trouble Challenges are precisely what makes analogue so appealing.
I don't want to go too much into the picture itself here, it's just a typical snapshot with a new camera. And yes – I know that the negative is also underexposed.
However, I would like to share with you how I “digitized” the picture. I do not have a scanner, but I do have a Makro. Since this can create 1:1 images, I chose an iPad as a backlight, held the negative in my hands (so the iPad would be blurry) and took photos with it D7000 simply remove the negative. (Yes, I know the advantages of a slide duplicator.) That explains the blurring at the top right edge - which is quite appropriate here. So to speak, tilt/shift for very little money…
You should make sure that you leave some space around the image, because you can then do the white balance on the "blank" film in the image processing program of your choice. Now you just have to invert the color of the image ("Apple" + I in Photoshop) and you have digitized an analog negative and displayed it with the correct color.
In the example above, I actually photographed the negative in bracketing mode and combined the three exposure variants into one image in an HDR program. So I was able to get some detail back from the shadowy areas.
So – and now I go out again and hope to find the right exposure time…
It may well be that the selenium cell has already seen its best days. Decades-old light meters with such photo elements should be treated with caution.
That's possible too, of course. I'll keep experimenting 🙂
The FM2 did not have a built-in selenium light meter. The measuring sensor was an SPD cell, short for silicon photodiode cell.
Unless you used an old handheld light meter. 😉
Thanks for the tip! Does it get “worse” over time…?
No, actually that shouldn't be the case.
My personal guess: maybe the shutter is a bit rusty. If you take more photos with the camera, this should go away at some point.
I used a clothespin and a flash to digitize slides, so I didn't have to hold them by hand and I think the light spectrum will be more extensive:
http://www.radeldudel.de/blog/0808/DiasDigitalisieren.html