I mentioned back in January that Emirhan had gone to China for ten days. E doesn’t particularly consider himself a photographer, but he did have a little point-and-shoot camera that he used sparingly whenever he got the opportunity. When he came back to Turkey, I asked if I could choose a few photos to edit, and the result is this set of remixes that has done nothing to quell my desire to see China. Link

I go on a lot about Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s photography and filmmaking, and he is certainly renowned throughout Turkey, but most people don’t realise that his sister, Emine, is an accomplished photographer in her own right. Her work goes down another type of path— it’s haunting in a different way, as well as being a more cosmopolitan complement to Nuri’s heavy Turkish influences. Link

I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that I was scheduled to photograph a birth for an acquaintance. Well, Mother Nature sometimes has her own ideas, and she doesn’t particularly care how we schedule things. Before anyone had a chance to get organized, the baby arrived almost two weeks early, after a labour of only an hour and 42 minutes. Basically by the time the Katie woke up and realised the baby was coming, it was nearly time to push, and there just wasn’t time to call anyone.

Obviously it’s disappointing that the photo session didn’t happen, but on the other hand I know they’re thrilled to have their new son with them, and mother and baby are both happy and healthy. I’m trying to schedule a time to get over there to get some photos of the newborn, so hopefully that’ll happen within the next week or so.

I’m always looking for photos that don’t sit anywhere on the axis between “tourist snaps” and “glossy pro shots.” I like photos that are off the beaten path, both in style and content. I absolutely love this set of photos from Canadian photographer Ali Bosworth. He visited Turkey last year, and captured it in a way not many photographers manage. Nostalgia is heavy in this set, and even if you’ve never been to Turkey before, you’ll feel like you’re looking at shots that remind you of trips you took long ago. Amazing work. Link

If you’re feeling ambitious after that Istanbul set, Bosworth has an entire collection of sets from his trip to Greece and Turkey, including a second Istanbul set, and some photos from other areas of Turkey, as well. Definitely worth a look. Link

Well, it’s official… I’m going to be photographing a home birth later this month. This all came along very unexpectedly, and I couldn’t be more excited.

Having no children of my own and never having attended a birth in any capacity, this is going to be all about firsts for me. I’m slated to be there from the time the contractions start, all the way through the birth and the baby’s first few hours, so this should be a real test of my stamina as a photographer.

It’s kind of silly to post about this now, since I don’t really have a lot of details yet, but rest assured more information will be forthcoming. Right now I’m just excited and a little bit stunned.

Recently I was lucky enough to be able to photograph the wedding of my friend Dania. Now, obviously I’m not a wedding photographer by any stretch of the imagination, but I have been known to agree to shooting a wedding here and there, where I would have the liberty to do my thing without restrictions. Dania didn’t want a lot of standard posed photos for her wedding, she just wanted someone who could get some captures of the day, so basically I had carte blanche to do whatever I wanted.

It was a blast, and without a doubt the most beautiful, serene, and fun wedding I’ve ever been to. It was a privilege to be there, not just as the photographer, but as a guest.

The rest of the public photos from the day are here. Many thanks to Dania and Enes for allowing me to share them.

Okay, I promised I was going to outline my method for scanning film negatives on a normal, run-of-the-mill household scanner. Before I get started, I feel I should mention that if you’re hoping to end up with scans that look like “normal” photos, that’s probably not going to happen by doing them this way. If you have film negatives and you want digital photos that don’t look like sins against nature, and you’re not in the market for a actual negatives scanner, then it’s likely you’ll either need to get prints made and scan them, or get the photos put directly on a CD instead of prints. On the other hand, if sins against nature are right up your alley, read on.

Here’s everything you need to get your scan on:

1. A computer with a normal, garden-variety scanner attached. I have an HP1410 printer-combo-thing that I bought for almost nothing several years ago. These are common enough that you may find one on the sidewalk somewhere. Any other scanner you have lying around is fine.
2. A canister of processed film negatives. Duh. Now, you can use a roll of negatives that came from your ultra-fancy expensive SLR, but there’s kind of no point in that with a scanning process this homemade. So I say get out and have some fun with a crappy toy camera, or an old vintage camera— something where you’re not expecting the photos to be “good” by any mainstream definition of the word. If you’re going to embrace the lo-fi method of doing things, don’t do it halfway. I used a Smena 6 for my experiment; any Lomo negatives would be great for something like this.
3. Some kind of small, portable white light source. The difference between a regular paper scanner and a negatives scanner is that a negatives scanner has a light source that shines through the negative from above, lighting it up so that the image on the negative can be “seen” during the scanning process. If you can come close to duplicating that kind of situation, you can get a pretty decent scan. For my light source, I used my trusty old Palm Tungsten T3, but you can also get decent results with the light from a mobile phone (an iPhone should work great). I’m not sure whether using a yellow light source like a flashlight would work— I can’t think of any reason why it wouldn’t, but I don’t have a flashlight large enough to give it a try (your light source needs to be at least as large as the negative you’re scanning).

The Egyptian Coke bottle and diamond-shaped dish full of Vegas dice are optional unless you want to be completely awesome.

While these are the only things you will need for the actual scanning process, if you want to do anything useful with your scans you will also need some kind of photo editing software that lets you play around with hue, brightness, and so forth, because chances are your scans will look like a big pile of nothing until you mess around with them. I happen to use Photoshop, but I’m sure there are other, less expensive or even freeware options out there if you’re not in the market for an Adobe product.

Step 1: Select your negative

This is pretty self-explanatory, though you might want to be a bit more careful with your negatives than I am. Again, I went as lo-fi as possible for this— expired film, in a mechanical Soviet camera that is almost half a century old.

Step 2: Get your light source ready

My old Palm worked extremely well for this, but you can use your ingenuity to come up with other ideas if you don’t have a Palm. Basically the result you’re going for is a bright screen that’s completely white. I accomplished this by making a perfectly white image file in Photoshop, sending it to the Palm, and viewing the white image in fullscreen at full brightness. I have heard of other people using the Note Pad application, which also gives an almost completely white screen. If you’re using a mobile phone, you might try setting your wallpaper to plain white and see how that works. Try different things.

Step 3: Put everything in place and scan

The rest is just a matter of alignment and timing. The general idea is to get the negative on the scanner glass, and pin it down using the light source. You may have to place a book or something on top of the light source if it doesn’t weigh enough to press the negative flat against the glass. Line everything up as well as you can, but don’t obsess, because you can always straighten out a wonky photo during the post-processing phase. As long as the whole of the negative has light shining through it, you’re good.

I mentioned timing— my Palm has a “convenient” energy-saver function that turns off the display if there’s no input for three minutes. There appears to be no way to turn this feature off. I know that most mobile phones have a similar issue, as well, so the trick is to get the actual scan done while the backlight is at its brightest, before it dims or turns off. The way I did it was by letting the scanner do its preview scan with the Palm turned off, and then when I selected the small area I actually wanted to scan, I turned the Palm on right before I hit the “ok” button for the final scan, doing my best not to move anything while turning on the Palm. That seemed to work okay, but you’ll have to play around with whatever light source you’re using.

As for scanning resolution, I would select the highest available resolution you have, because you are scanning a teeny-tiny thing and expecting to get something that will display at a reasonable screen size, and your equipment isn’t exactly made for the job. My scanner will go up to 4800dpi, and that worked pretty well. I’ve heard of people scanning negatives with a resolution as low as 300dpi, but I tried that and the result was pretty much unusable. Again, experiment with what you have. Maybe you have a better scanner than mine.

Step 4: Post-processing

When you see the results of your scan, your first thought will probably be, wow, that’s really crappy. Yes, it will be until you start messing with it. This is where your photo editing software comes in. I’ll talk in terms of Photoshop because that’s what I know, but you may have a different software suite you can adapt this to.

The first thing you need to do is invert your colours, because duh, you just scanned a negative. The ⌘i keystroke will accomplish this in Photoshop. Then, if you add a brightness/contrast adjustment layer, you can play around with the light. I find that most of my scanned negatives are way too dark (probably because the Palm doesn’t do as good a job of backlighting as a real negative scanner would), so I brighten them up a lot. You get some freaky results by jacking the light up that much, but freaky results are part of the fun.

You may also find that your colours are very, very strange. There are a million ways to adjust colours in Photoshop; I tend to use curves layers and/or colour balance layers. I’ve also been known to do solid colour layers with a soft light blending mode, masked over specific areas of the photo to change the colour of certain items (green for grass, blue for sky, and so forth).

If all of this sounds too complicated, it’s just because I’m explaining it a way that assumes you already know something about adjustment layers. If you need help doing this, a Google search for “Photoshop curves tutorial” or similar should yield you thousands of good, simple tutorials for bending colours around how you want them. Remember that you’ll probably never get a truly realistic look, so just go for something creative and have fun.

It’s up to you whether or not you want to crop the film sprocket holes out of your photo— personally I like them, and as you can see from the examples below, I’ve left mine in for the sake of atmosphere.

I hope you have some luck (or at least some fun) trying this out— please do link to your results or post them in the comments if you wish.

A couple of people here and a few more over at Flickr asked about my Smena 6, and specifically wanted to know if I had the manual. I guess a lot of these cameras are floating around out there in various conditions, with or without boxes and/or manuals; I was lucky enough to get one in near perfect condition with everything intact, so I thought I’d share.

The manual for the 6 is quite ’50s-looking to my Western eyes, probably because everything Soviet was about 10 years behind in terms of design, and these cameras were made and marketed during the ’60s. The manual is fantastic— if anyone is willing to do a working translation, please stand up.

A few sample pages:

I know there are quite a few of you nostalgiaphiles out there for whom these web-quality jpg samples just won’t cut it, and for that reason I’ve uploaded an uncompressed 300dpi pdf of the entire Smena 6 manual for your printing pleasure. Enjoy.

For all sorts of complicated reasons, I dug my old Smena 6 out today. I’m planning on using it tonight.

It’s got a million different settings, and I can only remember what half of them do.

Vodka helps me remember the other half.