An experiment with sprocket hole photography

I decided to experiment with sprocket hole photography with my Rolleicord on a cheap Fuji c200 film. Pictures are scanned emulsion side down on the glass with an Epson v500.

No special 35mm adapter was used: I just inserted the film at the bottom and guided it through the pickup spool at the top. The film cassette was held more or less in place by two blocks of foam I cut for the purpose. I used the camera on the red setting to NOT prevent double exposures, since you can't use the exposure counter anymore. When the advance mechanism engaged whilst I was forwarding the film, I just put the lens cap on, pressed the shutter at 1/500 and continued winding until I was at the next frame.

How did I determine how much to wind on? I measured the diameter of the empty pickup spool and I estimated the diameter of the full pickup spool. By using some mathematics, I figured out I should start with 2.3 turns for the first picture, gradually lowering to 0.75 turns for the last picture. This turned out just fine, since I had enough space between all of my negatives. I once made the mistake of advancing the film twice, so I lost a picture there. Otherwise I would have had 20 negatives on the roll out of a theoretical maximum of 24. So my formula worked out fine.

I noticed the Epson v500 is much sharper when the negative is flat on the glass. If you scan with the emulsion side down you will also avoid problems with Newton rings. I didn't put a glass on top of the negative but just held down the edges of the negative with 2 small booklets (Berlitx pocket travel guides).

Next time, I will try scanning my normal negatives this way. Maybe I'll have to make a special purpose negative holder to hold the negatives to the scanner glass.

Regarding the sprocket hole photography: I noticed something had scratched the negatives. The Rolleicord never did this before with 120 film, so it will probably be a grain of salt in the film cassette.

Some pics are fun, others are useless (I was often wrong about the vertical versus horizontal framing...). It was nice to do this for a change, but I prefer regular photography.

More pictures (and 15Mpx full resolution downloads) in the Flickr album:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/kodel/sets/72157633200794551/