If you have been shooting for more than a few years there is a good chance that you have a few archiving albums (you’re neat) or shoe boxes (you’re human) filled with old films.
Digitizing film is a tedious task and we have shared a great comprehensive tutorial on it before, but sometimes you need something quick and dirty (but not as dirty as a TP roll)
Lomography has a clever smartphone film scanner which is perfect for the job. Instructables user ASCAS has a DIY version of it.
You would need a project box, a few LEDs (the project uses singles, but you can use strips like we did with our light table) and some acrylic “glass”.
The acrylic provides some diffusion and backlight coming from the LEDs. The film gets back lit, while the project box provides some height for the phone camera to be able to focus.
If you are scanning slides, just click away, but if you are scanning negatives, remember to switch your phone’s camera to inverse exposure.
You can watch the entire process in the video below or head over to the Instructables page for the full build. (I am also including a vidoe of the Lomography scanner to get a good grasp on using the device).
