I have a couple of old lockets with very small (1 cm or less) photos in.
I'd like to get bigger (even postage stamp size would be a big improvement; I don't expect A3) copies as they are the only existing photos of one of my grandparents.
Using the 'macro' option on my camera just isn't good enough.
Any ideas?
Thanks
Owain
Scanner on high resolution?
Depends on what camera kit you have... traditionally a SLR with extension tubes between lens and camera was the way to go very close. Also sometimes you can get an adaptor that allows the normal lens to be reversed (i.e. mounted on the camera by its filter screw mount). That will also give a fairly extreme close up capability.
yep. Serious macro lens or high res scanner are the two options.
Many photo boutiques or professional photographers will have one or the other to hand.
And if at all possible, with the photo removed from the locket. Many modern scanners have a *very* shallow depth of field and will render anything that is not exactly on the scanner glass to be out of focus. Also the locket glass may be dirty and/or cause optical distortion near its edges if it's slightly curved and not flat glass.
If the photos can't be removed from the locket for fear of damaging them, maybe get someone with a good macro lens and even lighting from four corners to photograph the locket.
If using a scanner with the photos still in the locket, experiment with the locket rotated in various orientations because the light often comes from one side so any shadows may obscure part of the photo, and you want to "move" the shadow so it is on the frame rather than the photo. Try to rotate in multiples of 90 degrees because that allows photo manipulation software to rotate the scan back to the correct orientation without losses due to interpolation.
Maybe experiment with adjusting the gamma and histogram black/white points of the resulting scans/photos to improve the contrast slightly.
The "macro" option on your camera may not be good enough (mine, although
10 years old, will get down to 1cm from the object). Can you try a different camera with a closer macro setting?Having said that, it is more than likely the photos you have were cut from a 120 (Kodak Brownie) size photo, and really have little detail in them. If you enlarge them, they will be very grainy. Try looking at them through a x10 loupe and see how detailed- or otherwise - they are.
USB microscope???
Example, not seller recommendation
OR
Just watch out which supplier you use as some of these products have
0.3M pixel detectors (and some others claim higher but with interpolation)
I'd have thought the optical quality of the original camera's lens would be a fairly significant factor, in addition to the graininess of the original negative. Texture of printing paper and optical quality of enlarger lens would further degrade things.
I have a daguerrotype (negative on glass, viewed against a grey mirror to produce a positive image) in the form of a 2x3" photo in a bakelite-type frame. It was taken in about 1860 and the sharpness is superb, given the more primitive lenses and the need for a long exposure. Scanning that was "interesting": I had to experiment with various orientations to move shadows around, and a lot of tweaking of black/white levels and gamma to bring out as much shadow/highlight detail as possible. Weird to see my great great great grandma at the age of about 18.
This is a quick photo with my mobile phone
That's amazing.
My originals are (viewed with a 12x magnifier) not good quality, but getting them out of the locket and photo'd flat has made a significant improvement.
Still not great, but hopefully good enough for my mother to see images of her parents again. She's not long for this world.
Owain
+1 And as extension tubes are just empty tubes they are inexpensive to buy..
Depends if you buy ones filled with Kenko air or Canon air ...
Hold a camera lens backwards in front of your camera. It works.
NT
Well, I guess the 120 (negative) film would have had a fairly good resolution, but I have no idea about the printing paper. I wonder if an enlarger would have been used, or might it have been a simple contact print? Whatever, I would think that the camera's lens (if a Brownie) would have been a bit of a weak point. And, of course, we don't know under what conditions the photo was taken - light level, whether or not the subject and the photographer were completely still, etc.
Remarkable clarity, but not surprising for a Daguerreotype.
I had heard of that process, but knew nothing about it. One comment in the Wikipedia article fascinated me: "A well-exposed and sharp large-format daguerreotype is able to faithfully record fine detail at a resolution that today's digital cameras are not able to match". That referenced an article at
Fontayne and Porter were definitely skilled, but no one knew just how amazing their images were until three years ago, when conservators at George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, began restoration work on the deteriorating plates. Magnifying glasses didn?t exhaust their detail; neither did an ultrasharp macro lens. Finally, the conservators deployed a stereo microscope. What they saw astonished them: The details ? down to window curtains and wheel spokes ? remained crisp even at 30X magnification. The panorama could be blown up to 170 by 20 feet without losing clarity; a digicam would have to record 140,000 megapixels per shot to match that."
Wow!
If you take a black & white negetive, and view the emultion side with the light just right, you see a positive image in a Daguerre-esque manner.
I generally buy them secondhand (since I don't need working aperture linkage to use them on a telescope).
You can also get +1 +2 +5 diopter macro lens addons for an existing camera to allow closer focussing. Absolutely rigid mounting of the camera and using the time delay or remote is essential since tiny shift in camera position or vibration and the image will be motion blurred. SRB sell them.
The trick is to do it in good uniform light and with the longest lens you can get away with. I like 100mm. There may be a slight advantage in photographing it slightly off axis with a black cloth on the far side to lose any reflections from the cover glass. Use perspective correction to tweak it to square again. It is a bit trial and error but you should be able to get a decent image with modest kit.
I cannot help wondering though just how good such small photos are going to be if they are quite old ones. Somebody tried some of those little prints you used to get from black and white cameras for a friend a while back and at best it was grainy, at worst fuzzy.
Brian
Here's a close-up scan of her face
Very good for 1860s lenses and emulsions. Being a negative (viewed as a positive) there's only one photographic process, rather than the two with prints, but even so it's good.
I've seen some of the collodion prints on display at the Bradford photo museum of an early photographer's trip to (IIRC) Egypt, and they are remarkably sharp, given that the lenses were probably fairly large f numbers to get reasonable exposures with slow emulsions.
Even 35 mm negs/slides are not as good, limited by lenses and fine-ness of grain as a proportion of image size.
Done that. It works best if the neg is a bit under-exposed.
+1, even the lower resolution ones can give remarkably good images.
You don't say what sort of camera you have. Do you know anyone with better kit? Is there a local photographic club? They might have a facebook page, you might find someone who relishes the challenge and would ask for no more than beer tokens, if that. Whereabouts are you?
2 MP digital pointnshoot. It was very good in 200? something.
So far I've got as far as (all the same image)
Which hopefully will be good enough for the immediate future. If I have time and inclination later I'll try a scanner at the library (and/or ask them about local photography groups)
Thanks
Owain
It's always strange looking at pictures of ones ancestors. You wonder what they were like,how they lived. And what they would have thought of today's world.
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