Over the course of 2019 I finally decided I wanted to try out camera scanning. I wasn’t in a hurry, I figured I’d spend a couple of months figuring out a plan and then try to get everything together in early 2020.

The main limitation I was finding is that the examples I was seeing online were primarily for scanning 35mm film. There were a few film strip holders available but the ones I was seeing were all pretty fiddly, akin to sandwiching each film strip between 2 pieces of plastic with rubber bands. There were a lot of people out there on photography forums looking for the same thing though: an easy way to camera scan 120 film.

Since I knew I wanted to scan a lot of film, and I definitely didn’t want to screw around with cutting boards and securing them with rubber bands to make a negative carrier I kept trying to figure out a manageable way to do this. I also mostly had 120 film to scan: around 800 rolls most cut into 4 strips of 3 frames each and there weren’t any 120 film holders out there yet that I’d found.

One night while I was trying to figure out my plan I came across a kickstarter campaign for a company called Negative Supply and pretty much immediately signed up for it. That was in February 2020 and it wasn’t going to be delivered for another few months which was kind of perfect.

Since a 120 film carrier was the missing piece of the puzzle so this effectively gave me a green light to start figuring out how I was going to do all of this

Of course COVID-19 was traveling around the world at the same time and was about to change a lot of plans but at least in the US we didn’t really know that yet.