Scanning Joys

Today the scanning back arrived. Not without trouble though as Customs insisted on delaying the delivery for an inspection and then charging a small fortune in tax. But once in my hands the back was amazing. Today was mainly spent getting accustomed to the Viewfinder software that controls the camera. It's not the most intuitive, but once understood it is actually very sensible. Probably my favourite feature has to be the focus assist. You place a small card patch in the image that has a pattern on it, then select this patch in the preview scan. The program shifts the scanner head to those pixel locations and offers a live output. This is displayed as a r,g,b scope that has a sharp peak when in focus, not dissimilar to contrast focusing used by cheap point and shoot cameras. This will translate into perfectly repeatable focus points that will entirely remove focus errors and patchy focused images. The test image below is the first time I have been able to use my 90mm lens as previously the Dslr sensor could not get close enough to the plane of focus. It has a wider field of view than the 210mm and is considerably softer but now usable. The image was created from six scans with a healthy overlap. It's not focus stacked and it is not using all the image circle available but it is a spot on proof of concept..As I’m now ready to begin shooting the final images, I have to confront myself about what and where I’m going to image. I’m tempted to re-shoot the basement image and possibly the carpark but I’m still avoiding the issue.