Lucky Lego

Went to Legoland! It was hot!

I took my sweet little Olympus Pen FV there with a roll of Lucky C200, the Chinese made colour film.

I know it’s yet again more half-frame stuff but I just wanted something I could take lots of shots with but without worrying about changing rolls.

I’ll be honest I don’t have a ton to report back here. Legoland was good but it was a busy one for me with my young nephew, so I didn’t take a ton of photos.

I do quite like how these colours turned out though. What a fun film stock.

I really liked the fact that you can focus the Pen FV SLR-style rather than the fixed zones of the Pentax 17. However, you can see that the older lens does render things a little softer.

It’s a nicer construction than the Pentax however, and you can change the lens. It’s a total joy to use and I found myself finding excuses to take pictures.

Anyway it was a fun day, I didn’t post half my photos because they were of young family, but I fancied a shot of colour on my website photography feed so I posted the few I had anyway.

Bonus shot from my window:

Nerd Notes

This roll was scanned using Jack’s Big Scanlight, in R G B mode. That is to say, I rigged it to take a red a green and a blue image for each frame.

This coincides with the wonderful support for trichromes in NegPy¹. It now stitches the groups of three images together for you.

I found that the colours right out of the box were great, and any tweaks you make are easier to handle. I believe you lose a tiny bit of information when you do it this RGB way because in reality, chemicals on the film bleed into each other and it’s not just a strict red, green or blue. But all I can see is, I get usable images that I can edit easily vs a collection of small headaches.

To go even nerdier, what I did was set up my laptop to manage the photo taking process. It first takes a blank photo of an empty area of the film. Then it takes an R G and a B image of the film and measures the intensity. If it’s too bright, it adjusts the channels down on the scanlight, takes another picture. Wash rinse repeat until each channel is at 90-95% intensity.

A lot of this calibration intel comes from reddit and the wonderful Michael Wilmes’ Analogue Toolbox². It’s excellent software (and not vibecoded unlike negpy, which I love but is buggy lol), but there is no Linux version so I had to fiddle to get it to run in WINE. What really helped though was just reading his website and seeing the process—it allowed me to reproduce it in my own python script.

I am very lucky to have a scanlight that can be computer controlled, and to have a camera that works with gphoto2.

I also automated taking the RGB photos, and taking a flatfield photo. NegPy does flatfield correction too!

The flatfield and calibration are ideally done per roll (or for calibration, at least per-film stock), and so far I have noticed slightly better results when re-calibrating. Flatfield in particular is really nice to do and sorts out lots of little issues.

The downside is I have to trigger the scans with the keyboard now instead of my lovely shutter release pedal. Perhaps that’s the next step!

I’m getting in the weeds now but when I have finished improving the process I’ll possibly make a dedicated post about it.