Dennis Dimick has been a photographer and photojournalist for 50 years. Earlier this year he acquired tools from Negative Supply to begin camera scanning his mostly 35mm personal photo film archives. Over the years he has produced a large collection of black and white, color negative, and color transparency images – mostly Kodachrome.  He also has acquired a large collection of old negatives from his ancestors, which he is also digitizing. Since starting this project in early March, Dimick has now scanned more than 37,000 images and the work is ongoing. We visited with him in early July. You can find out more about Dennis at his website ddimick.com. His Instagram is @ddimick and twitter is @ddimick. 

Q: How did you first discover your passion for photography? 

 “As a college student in the early 1970s, I wanted to get into photography and began taking pictures and developing film in the student union darkroom at my university. I started taking journalism classes, got a job photographing for the student newspaper, and eventually became a newspaper photographer. I was a newspaper photojournalist for six years, and then spent 35 years as a photo editor at National Geographic. All the time I was working as a photo editor orchestrating book and magazine projects with photographers, I continued my own personal photography.”

Q: What do you enjoy most about shooting film? 

 “Well it is more contemplative and deliberate than digital photography. Film photography requires more precision and discipline, as each frame comes with extra upfront costs in more film shot. Also, the idea of a resulting negative or transparency appeals, as it does not require a computer to look at it. Analog film photographs as prints or slides or negatives do not require computer operating systems, imaging software, and specialized RAW file format decoders to read the images.”  

Q: What are some of your favorite film stocks? 

 “My favorite film stock was Kodachrome but it has not been manufactured for many years. My next favorite is Kodak Tri-X, a versatile film with ASA 400 rating that can be pushed in processing to work in low light or pulled in processing to have a long scale that works well in high-contrast light. After that I tend to play the field, I’ve been trying the new 2018 version of 35mm Ektachrome, and have shot quite a bit of Kodak Portra 160 on my Rollei Tessar 3.5. Sometimes I’ll shoot Fuji films it all depends.”

Q: How has our Negative Supply tools helped your workflow? 

 The film carrier MK-1 has allowed me to unlock my film archives of nearly 50 years.  From early March  2020 when the equipment arrived through the end of June I have digitized more than 35,000 black and white and color negatives from 35mm film rolls I’ve taken from about 1970 through 2018. I’m now working on organizing and digitizing hundreds of rolls of Kodachrome transparencies from the 1980s and 90s which will take several more months.” 

 “I’ve also inherited a collection of archival negatives shot by my grandfather starting in the 1930s. Most of this film is uncut 35mm black and white negatives, all tightly wound in the original canisters. The MK-1 Film carrier allowed me for the first time to digitize the images on this film. Conventional film scanners and other film digitizing attachments for cameras always require cut film to fit into strip-of-six negative holders, This old film, brittle and curling, cannot be cut. I’ve also got a collection of about 450 medium format (mostly nitrate) negatives from the mid-1910s that I previously scanned with a flatbed, but will rescan these once I get my 4x5 film adapter plate from you. 

 When I used a conventional film scanner I could scan maybe 35 frames a day. Last year I moved to camera digitizing attachments that hook on the front of a DSLR macro lens. While those allowed me to begin using cameras for image scanning, I’ve always faced alignment issues as I change frames. 

 The Negative Supply equipment, which provides a rock-solid platform for consistently moving film through the film carrier with constant alignment, makes it possible for me to digitize about 5 rolls of 36-frame 35mm rolls (cut into into six-frame strips) with repeated framing accuracy. Uncut rolls go even faster. 

 The quality I get from digitized negatives is so much better than I had thought possible, The sensor on my full-frame 35mm digital camera has an almost 14-fstop exposure latitude, so if there is anything in these negatives worth capturing, my camera succeeds. This at least by my eye, with better quality and orders of magnitude faster than with any scanner.”

 Q: What support or tool can Negative Supply provide to help improve your experience? 

 “Well the 35mm negative MK-1 is great and I’m looking forward to receiving the new 120 roll film version which I helped support though the Kickstarter. While the 35mm mounted slide holder for the Pro mount works great, it also might be interesting to see if there is a way to build a mounted 2x2 slide carrier that would allow for faster slide digitizing, perhaps something where a stack of slides could be placed on one side and a roller – like on the negative carrier – could push slides into position for exposure.”

 “That said I’m aware that mounted slides are an archaic technology now, and I’m very grateful for the technology advances and quantum increases in digitizing throughput I’ve been able to get from the Negative Supply tools.”

Equipment Used to Digitize:

Imaging with Canon EOS R 30 MP full-frame digital camera with 100mm f 2.8 L Canon Macro Lens. Canon EOS Utility 3 for live view capture via Macbook Pro. Editing in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom with negative conversion by Negative Lab Pro Plug-in. Images round-tripped into Photoshop for Canon CR3 to TIFF conversion. 

We would like to thank Dennis for allowing us to feature his incredible work, and for using Negative Supply tools to scan a record breaking number of images (37,000+)! If you’re interested in being featured on our blog, please send us an email via contact@negativesupply.co We can’t wait to see and share work from more of the Negative Supply community! Click the links below to learn more about the tools Dennis is using to digitize his work, and feel free to reach out with any questions you may have.