MUA: Inge Van den Broeck.

Now you can be extra cool with the easy-to-make-do-it-yourself Hipster-O-Matic™!!

No seriously.. I’ve had these analog film rolls laying around for a few years. And now I finally had these developed, not knowing what was on them. But when I got the film negatives back, I wanted them things digitalized.

Good film scanners are expensive. Not an option for the ocasional analog shooter that I am. Another option was to get them scanned by the store where I got these developed. But since I’m allergic to the .jpg format, I had to find a more difficult way!

After seeing Kai screw around with his Starbucks cups (which I didnt like – since daylight or flash-light is much better than iMac-light), I got creative..

So after a lot of duct tape, cardboard and white paper, I started capturing the almost 1:1 macro’s. The tricky part is to get a decent exposure and correct focus distance.

If I had used a 50mm lens (instead of the 90mm), I would have gotten a more-than-one-time magnification. This would have been a problem since my sensor is exactly as large as the 35mm film. The 90mm lens in combination with the extention tubes, gives a slightly lesser magnification. I think it’s around 0.90x. So I had a few mm’s around the edges to play with.

This is what the shot looks like on the cam.

After some color corrections these are the results that I got.. I’m no film expert, but you can easily tell by the image quality that the color film was expired (or just badly stored).

And a few BW’s..

and crop

Hope you guys enjoyed! I did

5DII + 50mm 1.8 @f1.8 – 1/50th – ISO3200

Using wide angle lenses probably isn’t the most popular thing when shooting models. But if you’ve seen some of my previous work, you’lI know I don’t tend to follow rules like that.

The lens is definitely usable wide-open, but stopping it down to F4 or F5,6 makes it razor-sharp. The first impressions regarding DoF are also pretty good. I’ve read some less positive remarks conserning this topic, but I’m going to have to wait for a field-test to decide on that.

As seen above, color rendition and contrast are also superb!

Conclusion: A suprisingly good, compact fixed focal lens. It’ll be a fun challenge to get to know the “new” focal length better

cracked my heart too..

After tons of intarwebz, I didn’t find any reseller that shipped Panasonic parts to Belgium. To be honest, I didn’t even contact Panasonic for this.
So I decided to search ebay for broken GF1′s. Alas, no luck there either. I did find another solution though: a glass screen protector.

This is no perfect fit (there is a bit space on the left side), but the whole LCD is protected.
I first considered gorilla-glass, but I didn’t find anyone selling/cutting/gluing that kind of glass.
Anyway, I’m happy with my, imho, decent fix!