13 12 2008

eBay shipping to Canada is ridiculous. A $30 item costs $8.99 to ship from anywhere in the USA to Watertown, and $54 to ship another 40 minutes to Kingston. I even found one monitor going for $12, with the only shipping option being expedited international for more than $330. I think I'll make the rounds of the computer places here to see if they're throwing out anything cracked. I want to get this built soon, cause I have quite a backlog of medium-format film that I want to digitize.

05 12 2008

Site graphical redesign is done! Now it matches the print portfolio, and is running on much more flexible code to boot. A lot easier to add new features now.
Current projects are applying to graduate schools, and building a new illuminator for my scanner. Three problems with the film adapter I have now:

- Designed for 35mm film only, so it can't fit 6x6 or larger formats
- Can't use the entire scan bed at once to scan multiple strips (I could scan several rolls of 9.5mm film at once if the whole bed was illuminated)
- Doesn't press the film down flat, so curved or curling film goes out of critical focus. I suppose this makes sense if you're worried about scratching the film, but I'd rather spend more time dusting and end up with sharper scans.

So I'm searching for old flat-panel displays, since the CCFL and diffusers behind the actual pixel grid should make a perfect full-bed illuminator. Planning to put a piece of nice clean optical glass (maybe polycarbonate, should be softer on the film) on the bottom and literally flatten the film to the scan bed; it's probably the best I can do without wet-mounting like on a drum scanner. As a bonus, the inverter's adjustable brightness (might have to figure out the logic for that one, drive it with an arduino or something) could let me do a couple of scans with different exposure levels, then combine them into a scan with dynamic range somewhat approaching that of a color transparency.

As a result, I put in a photo section for 6x6 film, but it's got nothing in it yet. I'll update here when some of it has been scanned.

02 12 2008

In the midst of this redesign of the website, I decided to add a page for news, because I got tired of seeing the same thing every time. Too static. I'll try and keep it updated with projects and other stuff I'm working on.