Fine-Tuning Film Photography

Should you edit your scans — and if so, how would you do that, if the film was exposed with a few LEGO bricks? And what about doing that for a living?

In this monthly letter for GOLD members, I’m introducing a new course on editing film photos, sharing some bonus content related to the unique and rare LEGO film camera, touching on the challenges of being a full-time creative, and setting the expectations for the next month on Analog.Cafe.

In this letter: The nuances of editing film scans. A working film camera made of only LEGO bricks and components. Download: film scans from the LEGO camera. Becoming a creative professional. Next month on Analog.Cafe. Support this blog & get premium features with GOLD memberships!

The nuances of editing film scans.

Every now and then, I see a genuine question posted on social media about whether film scans should be edited. On websites like Threads, where the algorithm pushes content regardless of followings, the responses follow quickly. “You’re supposed to!”

I think it’s entirely up to the photographer — if the image is good as-is, why not post or print it as such? But sometimes, it can be made better — which I promise is not at all blasphemous.

Techniques like histogram equalization can remove base fog from expired slide film and open up the negative inversion process. Reference greyscale masks are more practical than guessing while colour-balancing an image. Even sharpening has its place in the film-editing pipeline. Of course, there are reasons to restrain oneself or stand back from edits, too.

“How to Edit Film Scans” is a brand-new course on the matter for GOLD members. It includes everything I’ve learned over the past seven years of shooting and editing film. There, you’ll find tons of illustrated guidance and a high-resolution colour-negative scan to follow along and experiment with using any image editing software of your choice.

A working film camera made of only LEGO bricks and components.

You’d think that after nearly two hundred years of photography, we’ve exhausted every conceivable film camera design — but no.

Zung Hoang lent me his incredible creation — a fully functioning 35mm film camera made entirely out of LEGO bricks — which I wrote all about in the October 8th post for GOLD members, “Hands-on With ZH1, a WORKING LEGO Film Camera.”

So far, his project has earned him 10,000 votes on the LEGO IDEAS website, paving the way for it to potentially become an official kit you can buy.

In the article, I went into full detail about how this project came about and Zung’s two-year journey to get the right components. Of course, it’s not your typical rangefinder, but ZH1 has an actual plastic lens with interchangeable apertures and shooting formats, making it a powerful creative tool (that’s kind of tricky to use). I put several rolls of film through it; the story of my experience with this tool and the results are all there.

It’s still unclear if LEGO will accept the project (there is serious competition), and even if they do, it’ll take months of refinement to become a product. But I thought that at least part of the creative process could be handed to you right now:

Download: film scans from the LEGO camera.

I prepared a package of files from ZH1 that you can download, view in the fullest resolution and edit at your leisure (using the lessons in this tutorial).

The zipped folder includes three TIFF files of raw film scans of photos taken with LEGO ZH1 on Cinema Shorts 250D and their edited JPEG versions. Feel free to play around with them as you wish — they can make a fun practice for inverting film negatives manually and applying extreme corrections to make them look right. You are free to share them with your friends also (but please mention this blog if you’re posting them publically and, you know, don’t sell them). Anyways, here they are: