Having worked through my old digital images, I’ve begun to sort through my transparency photographs.

I shot on transparency film exclusively for a number of years at the turn of the century: most were mounted and scanned, but as I shot more print film and then moved onto digital capture, I left transparency film by the wayside. I have quite a few rolls to go through.

Shooting on 35mm and medium format film, I found the images on transparencies, especially when projected or on my light-box, to be full of gorgeous detail and light. However, my scans never quite measured up to what I saw “live”. Furthermore, on Kodak’s beautiful Technical Pan film, a single scan pass didn’t do justice to all the detail held therein.

After chancing by an article in the Guardian, in which a photographer talked of scanning his images for highlights, shadows and mid-tones before layering them in photoshop, I changed my scanning technique. I made three scans of each image for the bright areas, shadows and “normal” areas then looked to how I could best combine them.

The internet is full of tutorials on this, but I found the most comprehensive (and understandable) ones gave pointers on using image>apply image with layer masks on Photoshop. After recording a few steps, I worked through the scans pretty well. As to the results?

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I’m currently working through some donated rolls of 35mm film on my rangefinder: black and white print film. In time, I hope to be working through more 35mm and medium format film and I’ll be trying more scanning and blending techniques to display them.