Digital BW, The Print

A flat bed scanner utilizes reflected light and negatives/slides need the light 
to pass through them.  I don't see how you would get it to work unless you 
rigged up something of an overhead light on your scanner. 

I know you are going to think this rather dumb but it works.  Assuming you 
have your negs cut and in sheet type negative sleeves, tape them a sheet 
at a time to a window on a bright day. Then using your best macro lens 
simply photograph each sheet.  You won't get repro quality but good 
enough to look at on the computer and print out for referrence. I use my 
digital camera so it makes tweaking pretty easy.  

If you can get close enough to fill the frame, I'd trust the in-camera meter 
and then maybe fudge a stop for a test.

Of course you will have to invert in Photoshop but since they are B&W, at 
least you won't have the orange mask to deal with.

Greg

> Just discovered that a couple of hundred rolls of 35mm black and white
> negatives I've been carting around for about 25 years (and had been
> planning to start working with again, digitially) have become
> separated from their contact sheets, perhaps permanently. I'm
> wondering if it's possible to scan these in, a roll at a time, to make
> electronic contact sheets, using an ordinary flatbed scanner. My first
> attempts were utter failures -- they scanned in much too dark, so that
> when inverted in Photoshop were much too light, and fiddling with the
> white and black points did not improve things much -- but I'm
> wondering if anyone has successfully done this, and if so how. I'm
> really loathe to re-enter the chemical darkroom after two decades plus
> away.
> 
> Thanks,
> David
> 
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