Tuesday, December 14, 2010

1972 Rolling Stones flashback

rs6C charlie watts
Most transparency scanners have software called Digital ICE or something like it. I forget what the ICE stands for, but the purpose of the software is to recognize and remove dust and lint specks from the images as they are scanned.
It uses infrared light which works fine on color negatives and slides, but not at all on silver halide images, i.e. black and white negatives.
So a high resolution scan of a black and white negative necessitates a tedious and painstaking process of removing every speck in Photoshop. One. Speck. At. A. Time.
Back over Memorial Day weekend, I promised a friend some high-res scans of my photos from a 1972 Rolling Stones concert in Indianapolis. I’ve been searching, off and on, since then for my black and white Stones negs. I hadn’t seen them since we moved from Indiana and worried that they might be lost forever.
Not so. I found them yesterday and went to work last night scanning the best images and, of course, removing the thousands of dust specks and a lot of tiny scratches and some crazing that is a consequence of not storing the negs in ideal temperature and humidity for nearly 40 years.
Here’s my favorite shot of Stones drummer Charlie Watts from that July 12, 1972 concert at the Indiana Convention Center. Stevie Wonder was the opening act.
If anyone cares, it was shot on Kodak Tri-X with a Pentax Spotmatic and an Accura 200mm lens.

1 comment:

max bittle said...

This is awesome! Have any more?