Publish to the web
You now have internet ready versions of your analog film photos. It has been quite a long process, but you can be proud of what you have done. Time to share it with the world. I use flickr which offers some great ways to share photos, showcase your best work and connect with people all over the world. I upload whole rolls at a time and put them into their own album. For the album title, I start with the date and then the place I went to. If I took more than one roll that day, I add ‘roll 1’ at the end as appropriate.
I do not rename the files or add a comment. There are too many of them and I don’t have the time. Maybe at some point in the future, who knows. When I do wish to share a photo in a flickr group, then I add a comment similar to the following:
Olympus OM-2n, Zuiko 50mm f1.8, Ilford Delta 400 in Ilfotec HC 1:31, 20°C, 7:30min (400ASA), Scanned with Olympus XZ-1, processed with Darktable.
Having a comment like this helps people who are interested in film photograph to understand your process. As you know from reading this, I use a standard Ilford process so there are no surprises to my information. If you become more adventurous then this information becomes more interesting to people. You may also wish to catalog and share your ‘dev recipes’ as they tend to be called on sites such as filmdev.org.
Backup to your cloud
Unless you have already made additional backups, then you will only have one master copy of your negative scans and their processing. Whilst your exported images my be safely uploaded to flickr or similar website, what about your master copies? You should purchase and use an good cloud storage solution. I use pCloud myself, since it is compatible with linux, integrates with the file manager for seamless use and offers good storage at a cheap price.
Darktable is a non-destructive editor, meaning it does not alter your original RAW scans. It stores all your edits in a XMP file in the same directory as your RAW scans. This file is a history of all your active modules and actions. Darktable u every time. This is very powerful and makes backing everything up, inclses this to ‘replay’ these actions to a RAW scan to get you back to where you were from the RAW scanuding the complete history of your processing actions alongside the RAW scans and exports. I expect this is a standard technique and related software such as RawTherapee will almost certainly do similar.
Share the best images
The final step to help make the photographic community aware of your great photos is to post them into an interest group on flickr. You should start by searching for groups directly related to the film camera you use, the film you use and even the dev chemistry. I post into the … groups.
There are alternatives to flickr groups of course, such as instagram hashtags. A brief search on the internet and you will surely know nore than I do about sharing your photographs!
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