Contrasting Weather

Well there I was on one of the hottest days of this year facing the ever daunting pile of transparencies queued for scanning. Scanning is not exactly fun at the best of times and turning on another heat generating computer in the already baking office wasn't going to make it any better. Then I remembered my photographs from February when we experienced heavy snowfall – rare in these parts. Maybe working on these images from one of the coldest days of his year would help me through the heat.

Now I had put off scanning these images due to the fact I had used Fujifilm Velvia 50 and at the time I wasn't completely comfortable with scanning this medium which is notoriously difficult to scan. I had owned my Imacon scanner for only 6 months and was still climbing a steep learning curve. At that point I'd largely kept to scanning the scanner friendly Fujifilm Provia. Why had I chosen Velvia then? Provia tends to have a slight blue tint about it and as snow also has a tendency to record in the blue end of the spectrum too I felt this was a good time to break open a couple of boxes of Velvia. However when I later viewed the transparencies on the light box I decided these were going to be more of a challenge to scan that I first thought and so put them aside for easier projects.

BURRINGTON COMBE FROM WRINGTON, NORTH SOMERSET

In the intervening months I have almost completely converted to Velvia. I purchased an IT8 target for Velvia 50 from Wolf Faust and created a Velvia 50 colour profile for my Imacon. I had noted from forums that many Imacon users do not profile their scanners and indeed the “Auto” option in the Imacon's Flexcolor software does a remarkable job in balancing colour from a Provia scan without the need for a dedicated profile, but in my experience that cannot be said for Velvia. A profile changed all that and creating scans that match the original transparency is now a very simple and (more importantly) repeatable process.

With white being the dominant colour, my snow scenes still presented a challenge in keeping that famous magenta cast at bay, but they were a breeze compared to what they would have been without the profile.

If you are wondering if working on my snow scenes helped make the heat of the day more bearable, no would be the answer! It didn't help when I discovered I'd left one of my external backup disk drives on all day and I actually gave myself a small burn from it. Blasted external drives, now there's a topic for another day.....