Today someone asked me to elaborate about my reference yesterday to the Canoscan’s 8800F “budget” characteristics … here’s a quick summary and a comparison with a Nikon Coolscan 5000.
As a very quick introduction, the Canoscan is a budget flatbed scanner from Canon. It has a high max DPI resolution and retails at the very low price of somewhere between $160 – $200. When I first got the scanner, I was amazed that it could support such a wide variety of film formats – from 35mm film to MF to regular …

Day 3 was actually the purpose of the trip. Woke up at 5am and drove 20 minutes from the campsite to a place called Badwater. This is the lowest point in the US, and during the summer some of the hottest temperatures of anywhere in the world are experienced. The flats of Badwater stretch for miles. Due to the extreme climate, very little water and / or life is sustained and you can walk unimpaired in pretty much all directions. When rain does fall, it goes through a freeze–thaw and …

Day 2 started by leaving Reno in the morning and driving 8 hours South, stopping off for occasional leg stretching, photoshooting and a rosie lee. At around 6pm we arrived at the top of Death Valley National Park and began the 30 minute decent into the park. Being a man who doesn’t like to overplan these sorts of things, I hadn’t arranged a parking spot at the campground (for which we had no camping gear anyway). After 24 hours of driving over two days, I started to look a little …

As I’ve started to shoot more and more film recently, a question I often get asked is what the resolution of 35mm film is like and how it stacks up against the latest DSLR technology.
Here’s a quick answer – very well.
This isn’t an in depth comparison – as I don’t have a side by side right now to show, but here’s a recent scan of a 35mm negative. Quick specs of the gear used to produce this shot are:
Camera: Olympus OM-4
Lens: Olympus OM Zuiko 55mm f/1.2 shot at approx f/5.6
Film: …