While I was organizing the negatives I also got the rest of my equipment together and Negative Supply delivered on their 120 carrier via kickstarter.

Here’s everything I ended up using:

• Camera: Fuji X-Pro2 (24mp APS-c mirrorless digital camera)
• Lens: Fuji XF 80mm f2.8 Macro
• Misc Camera: Canon generic cable release + dummy battery adapter
• Negative Carriers and support: Negative Supply (35mm, 120, 4×5)
• Copy Stand: Negative Supply
• Light Panel: Raleno LED 95+ CRI
• Level: Starrett 135A Pocket Level
• Software: Adobe Bridge + Adobe Lightroom Classic w/ Negative Lab Pro, Fuji X Acquire (for tethering)

I already had the X-Pro2 camera – and it was not the best choice for all of this scanning – I knew that would be the case but resisted buying a camera better suited for this.

I did buy the Fuji Macro lens for this project as i was having problems with focus drift with the older Nikon macro lens I had originally gotten. Having the lens pointing straight down caused the focus to creep. Having a dummy battery adapter is well worth it (or a camera that can be powered externally). The last thing you want is for the battery to die while you’re in the middle of a scanning session.

So with all of this set up and my camera tethered to the computer my office room was almost completely consumed with this project. I started with a dry run of a single sheet of negatives and went through the entire workflow: scanning, file name changing, importing to Lightroom, converting to positive, and tagging images. I tweaked things where needed but for the most part it worked as planned.

Then I did about 10 sheets to test out bulk scanning to some degree. It’s a time-consuming and physically demanding project. You’re kind of hunched over the camera to some degree checking focus regularly, and swapping strips of negatives every 3 frames.

A better setup would be a camera with an externally mounted HDMI screen placed at a convenient angle to confirm focus. It doesn’t really matter so much for a roll or 2 but for hundreds of rolls of film buy (or rent) the right camera and an external screen!

After ironing out the kinks I took my first stack of sorted negative sheets and got to it. I found that after about 30 minutes I really couldn’t check focus very well and my back would start to hurt so I’d scan for 20-30 minutes then spend another 20-30 minutes at the computer filing those rolls.

Some days I didn’t scan at all, and some days I’d do 2 1 hour sessions. I got quicker at it and could go for longer (after a lot of practice). This whole time my office had piles of negatives and binders laid out everywhere – which was my motivation for completing this.

In the end I spent approximately 2 months completing this, maybe a bit more. I tried to not scan on the weekends but I would spend some time cleaning up scanned images in Lightroom, straightening crops, bulk tagging images with camera / lens data and film type, spot checking my organization etc…. I was mostly trying to make sure that when I finished the actual scanning I wouldn’t have another giant pile of computer work to do.