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Thread: Hello from the Pacific NW

  1. #1

    Join Date
    Jan 2021
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    5

    Hello from the Pacific NW

    As an introduction, I'm not a large format photographer, but my father was. I found this forum searching for information on good large format negative scanners.

    My father was a professional photographer in Los Angeles and later the Central Coast of California. He graduated from Art Center in 1947 after his education was interrupted by WW II and was a commercial photographer for many years. His long life finally came to an end last September at 100. His body just wore out.

    My sister didn't want to deal with the stuff from the estate so she shipped it all to me (I'm near Portland, OR). My father probably had some OCD. He was finicky about taking care of his equipment and kept everything. On top of photography he was also into trains, books, and classical music. There's lots of all categories to go through.

    During the Christmas break I started into the photography stuff. My sister would like to get scans of all the negatives so we know what we have. Of the 4X5 negatives, there are probably more than 1000 probably a lot more than that. I haven't found them yet, but there are 8X10 negatives too. When Nikon came out with the Nikon F he began to switch to smaller formats and most of what he shot after 1960 was 35mm with some 120mm.

    I found an Epson 4870 scanner, but I have no idea if it still works. It was shipped to me without the locks engaged. I started searching for information on more modern scanners capable of scanning the large negatives. From reading it appears the purists prefer wet mount scanning, but with over 1000 negatives to scan, we need something that we can get a medium resolution decent quality scan quickly, then we can decide if we want to get fiddly with more involved techniques for a few that we want to get done with more detail.

    There is also a ton of photographic equipment I'll be selling on. Virtually all of it is in excellent condition. Last weekend I found his Rollie and in another box was the box the Rollei came in. All look virtually new. I've found two 4X5 cameras and an 8X10. One of the 4X5s and the 8X10 are in their own trunks. I've just started scratching the surface of the camera equipment. I may have some questions about what some of the accessories are as I dig them out.

    While I can appreciate keeping the old skills alive with film photography and I can appreciate the technical details (being both a history geek and an engineer), my life doesn't lend itself to pursuing this kind of hobby. I have other hobbies I haven't been able to do much with for years. Life's responsibilities get in the way.

  2. #2

    Join Date
    Dec 2018
    Posts
    991

    Re: Hello from the Pacific NW

    Welcome!
    There are lots of knowledgeable people here with regards to equipment, techniques and photo history.
    We don't do equipment valuations here, but it is a good venue for buying & selling after you're a member for 30 days. (Be sure to read the FAQ's first.)
    The Scanning sub-forum is quite active, you can get lots of info there...hope to see some of your father's images.

  3. #3

    Join Date
    Jan 2021
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    5

    Re: Hello from the Pacific NW

    I know most people don't usually do so, but I did read the rules before signing up. It will probably be a month before I'm ready to sell anything. I know I need to value things myself, but I think I may need some help identifying some things.

  4. #4

    Join Date
    Dec 2018
    Posts
    991

    Re: Hello from the Pacific NW

    Lots of knowledgeable people here to help with identifying photo gear...
    My condolences on the loss of your father.
    Where on the Central Coast was he based, and what type(s) of photography did he do?
    I lived in SLO in the 1990's.

  5. #5

    Join Date
    Jan 2021
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    5

    Re: Hello from the Pacific NW

    He did commercial photography when he was in Los Angeles. His thing was fixing photographer's screw ups and making everything look right. He was stripping together many elements to make a picture that looked like it was taken that way long before Photoshop.

    One of his accounts were the Kahlua print ads. He did all of them for many years. For some reason they would have many different elements like a beach scene, an outdoor tiki bar, the drink, the bottle, and the tiki statue would all be different pictures that he would have to put together to make something that looked like it had all been taken together as one shot.

    He also did a lot of annual reports. I remember one from a Union Oil annual report that was of some facility they had built somewhere. The lighting of the facility was OK, but the sky was bland and dead. He stripped in a more interesting sky.

    Near the end of his time in LA he started doing album covers for Columbia records. They had a country album where the photographer on the day had screwed up and the backgrounds in all the shots were black. They couldn't get the location again and the artist was unavailable, so they needed him to save it. He brought out all the details in the background and made it look natural.

    Back in the early 70s he had gotten together with some other photographer friends to get a Kodak dealership to get supplied wholesale. My father got the account and his friends bought from him wholesale. My parents expanded that into a mail order business in the mid-70s. By the mid-80s a lot of his contacts at the ad agencies were retiring and they decided to get out of Los Angeles. I had gotten into Cal Poly and was going to be starting there soon (I'm the youngest of 2 kids), so they decided to move to Morro Bay, which they liked quite a bit. He scaled back the commercial photography business quite a bit and expanded the supply business.

    He always did nature photography as a hobby and expanded that in his semi-retirement. He was a docent and gave camera walks at Montana del Oro and he left a lot of art photographs of the Central Coast. Though those probably aren't a topic for this forum since they were taken on 35mm film or digital. In his 80s he dove into Photoshop and got quite good at it. It probably helped that he knew how to do all the Photoshop techniques the old analog way. I remember him commenting that things that used to take a week to get right would only take an hour in Photoshop.

    You may have crossed paths with him.

  6. #6

    Join Date
    Dec 2018
    Posts
    991

    Re: Hello from the Pacific NW

    I did cross paths with your father, he was an excellent source for hard-to-find Kodak supplies.
    I remember him being extremely knowledgeable and willing to give advice.
    Again, my condolences.

  7. #7

    Join Date
    Dec 1999
    Location
    Forest Grove, Ore.
    Posts
    4,675

    Re: Hello from the Pacific NW

    What was his name?

  8. #8

    Join Date
    Jan 2021
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    5

    Re: Hello from the Pacific NW

    My father was very into the technical details of everything. He had a talent for engineering that never got fully fulfilled. He also liked helping people out.

    One of his customers was the photography department at Cal Poly and he was asked to be a guest lecturer. He also beta tested film for Kodak.

    And Neil, his name was Bill Olson.

  9. #9
    Peter
    Join Date
    Apr 2007
    Location
    Morro Bay, Ca
    Posts
    727

    Re: Hello from the Pacific NW

    To answer your question, the Epson V850 is the latest and very capable flatbed scanner for film up to 8x10. There are many excellent examples of its capabilities posted here on this forum. If you go to the image sharing section you can see some examples. Mostly everyone who posts photos also posts the technical info on their images ...
    https://www.largeformatphotography.i...amp-Discussion
    If you'd like to see more specific and detailed info, copy and paste this into the google search engine ... site:largeformatphotography.info + V850

    Peter

  10. #10

    Join Date
    Jan 2021
    Posts
    5

    Re: Hello from the Pacific NW

    I've been educating myself on scanners. My father had an old Epson flatbed (4870) and a Kodak 35mm scanner (3600). I've been looking around and the Kodak is so old they never made a Windows 7 driver for it. The 4870 predated Win 7, but there are Win 7 and 10 drivers. I found both scanners but haven't found any film carriers anywhere. My father may have been doing wet mount scanning, but while that might be in order for a few images we want the best scans of, for generating the catalog of what we've got I need something to go as fast as possible, and even at that it will likely take a while.

    I've looked at used Epson 700s and 750s on Ebay as well as the 800/850. The 850 may be outside our budget, but it definitely looks like the best scanner for making a lot of large negative scans as quickly as possible except some large scale scanners that are only justified by a lab like one at the National Archives or something. I'm watching Ebay for 700s, 750s, 800s, and 850s. The extra set of film carriers the 850 comes with would probably come in handy. Whoever does the scanning (once I get a procedure I'm thinking of finding a starving college student or something) can load one carrier while the other is scanning.

    I'm also thinking of getting a new 35mm scanner too. I spent the weekend organizing the 35mm slides. I knew there were a lot of them, but I think the total is about 3X what I thought was there. I filled two 20X20X20 cube boxes, three smaller boxes, and left a stack of loaded carousel boxes to be boxed up when I come back with the right sized boxes. From my research it looks like Plustek is the one to get for that job.

    One of the things I'm going to need this forum for is identifying some of the more obscure stuff. I found something that looks like it might be a homemade 4X5 camera the other day. Though it might be something my father bought from a small camera maker. I was going to take pictures this weekend, but didn't get to it. 35mm gear is usually pretty easy to identify.

    At worst a search engine answers my questions in a few minutes, but some of the large format equipment has me scratching my head. Most of it is from the 50s which was when my father did most of his large format photography.

    I just remembered he also had a large cache of nitrate negatives. When we lived in Los Angeles, the house had a built in barbecue pit on the outside side of the fireplace. My father had all his nitrate negatives stored out there. I remember he was working on a process to transfer the images to modern film base. I think he got it to work, but I don't know how many of those old images he converted. He was so paranoid about fire (probably in part because of his WW II experiences) that he would not have stored them in the house again. I never asked him what he did with all those negatives that were stored in the barbecue area.

    The boxes of negatives mostly filled the barbecue area. About 3-4 feet across and about 4 ft high.

    He could be so industrious that if he got motivated he might have transferred all those nitrate negatives to new backing material. I hope they weren't thrown out. That would be the bulk of his photography before the early 50s.

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