Hey everyone,

Im a second year photography student. I’ve been shooting large format since high school, specifically 5x7 for the last 2 or so years.

I’ve always been a diy-er. On a part time, high school fast food workers’ salary, it’s not like I was buying fancy cameras. Always beat-up gear from ebay that I either tolerated being a little broken or fixed up myself, I pride myself on being good at finding deals. For the most part, I’ve made all my work in a barebones bathroom darkroom after buying someone’s darkroom equipment setup on craigslist for a few bucks. A little desk lamp hooked up to a timer has served me like a champ for making contact prints.

Last year when I went to college, I started using the school’s Imacon scanner for inkjet printing. Since my school never reopened because of COVID, I worked from home (a few states away) this last semester, mailing film to the school so the lab techs could scan it for me. They did this for free for all the kids who took the large format class.

Right now, I’m in a bit of a predicament. The semester is over for me and the school lab is closed for the winter. But, I have to submit work for a serious-ish exhibition application in about a month and a half and thus need to scan a bunch of my 5x7s to make some large (~40”, ideally) inkjet prints. I bought the cheapest epson v750 I could find on ebay but had to return it because it was non-functional. Quite frankly, I can’t afford to drop hundreds or thousands on getting them commercially scanned. I’ve got 500$ to find a way to make these images and I don’t really know if it’s worth it to keep trying to find a used epson online (this last one being just the most recent of a long line of broken ebay scanners Ive had to return over the years).

The only other option that comes to mind is trying to use a digital camera. A friend/mentor has given me an old phase one H25 digital back (22mp) that I’ve been playing with on my view camera. I could feasibly digitize my negatives with this, stitching multiple captures together like people do with DSLR’s.

Before I go out and spend my budget on a light table and other things I’d need to scan with the digital back — is there any other scanner/method I don’t know of within my budget to make these scans? I’m adamant about not having someone else do it because I want something I can continue to use in the future. I don’t want to spend my budget /just/ on this set of scans. Obviously I understand the practical limitations, I’m clearly not going to get the best-of-the-best final prints imaginable and that has never been my goal. I just need to make the prints and have them be acceptable. I’ve seen prints at the Broad in LA that I’d be embarrassed to pin up for critique in my 300-level photo classes as far as their technical quality, so I’m not sweating too hard over that, the images just need to be made.

Thanks for the help!


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