Copying photographic film with the Nikon D810 and a shoe box by Anthony McKee (www.anthonymckee.com):
While many photographers are keenly waiting for the new Nikon ES2 film digitising adapter set to arrive in stores, I have been making use of my own Nikon film copying kit that I put together a while ago using a Nikon D810, a 105 micro lens - and a shoebox.
I was asked a couple of years ago by a friend if I could digitise some old slides for her, but I lacked one rather essential piece of equipment: a film scanner. Over the years I have had regular access to film scanners, from state-of-the-art drum scanners through to smaller desktop models, but over time the interfaces and software drivers have all become obsolete. And despite making regular scans, I found that many film scanners were not really that good at scanning film; some scanners struggled to capture the full dynamic range of negatives and slides, and others had occasional problems with banding.
I was about to tell my friend to take her 180 slides to a local photo lab when I started thinking through some other options. I owned a Nikon D810 camera, a Nikon 105mm micro lens and a couple of SB-700 speedlights, and I also remembered an old shoe box stored away in a cupboard. The box had a white interior and I realised that if I put the two Speedlight flash units into the box, each pointing towards opposites ends, the resulting light in the middle would be soft and even.
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