I mostly use Leica rangefinder cameras (M7 with Summicron 35/2 Asph, and M2 with Summicron 50/2). I also use a Contax RTS II, with Zeiss Distagon T* 28/2, Planar T* 50/1.4, Sonnar T* 85/2.8. Some old pictures were taken with a Minox GT (with Minoxar 35/2.8), and a Nikkormat FTN (with Nikkor 28/2.8 and 105/2.5).

I scan films with a Nikon Super Coolscan 5000 ED scanner, at 4000dpi. This produces 33-37Mb tiff image files. As a driver, I use the excellent VueScan sotfware (professional version), bought after a disappointing experience with the Nikon software. VueScan allows a great deal of control on the scanner's settings, which (after some practice) becomes very useful. The software also offers some image processing capabilities, but I leave those to Photoshop, except for the very effective infrared dust removal.

The scanned images tend to appear underexposed, but the colour reproduction is good. After scanning, I import the files into Adobe Camera Raw, mainly to restore the original film colours. In this sense the colours are "natural." (Thus all night shots have warm colours, because I use a daylight film without filters.) After Camera Raw, Photoshop is seldom needed. In spite of the high quality of the scanner, I found that the very delicate tones that Leitz and Zeiss lenses can record on film are often difficult to reproduce in a digital medium.

For publication on the web, I re-size the images (1400 x 900 pixels), and then convert them to jpeg format. The thumbnails files are much smaller (300 x 200), to reduce download times.

I scanned earlier slides with an Epson Perfection 4990 scanner, at 3200dpi (the maximal resolution is 4800dpi). It's a good scanner to get started with; it does a respectable job for a fair price (300 pounds). The colour reproduction is acceptable to good, as long as the colours are plain. However, I did encounter situations where the colours in the scanned image were unsatisfactory, and difficult to correct in post-processing. (I am sure that an expert in colour management would know how to solve this problem.)

The automatic dust removal is not always effective, so I ended up keeping it switched off, removing dust spots and scratches in Photoshop. The software that prepares thumbnails from the preview scan sometimes gets confused, cropping images in inappropriate ways. For this reason, I tended to frame the area to be scanned manually.