Paul Grossmann Photography

This particular Howtek 8000 that I made my scans on was not the one I received my training on. I used to work at a camera store in Manhattan that sold high end gear such as the Howtek. A technician from the manufacturer in Maryland came to our store for two days to train me on it. Apart from using software that is not very user friendly you had to load the drum with film, a task that takes some practice.

The drum itself is a large acrylic cylinder. It is huge. At a rough guess I think you could mount 4 8×10 pieces of film to it. Or any number of 35mm, 2 1/4 or 4×5 pieces of film. The drum is placed in a mounting station that allows you to rotate the drum as you load film onto it. It is loaded by taping the film to it, then taping a piece of acetate over the film. You only tape one side of the film and one side of the acetate, making hinges out of the tape. Then you squirt oil under the film, then on top of the film, then you close the acetate down on top of the film and seal the whole thing up with tape. A film and oil sandwich of sorts. Of course you squeeze all the air bubbles out before you seal it up. And you make damn sure the tape is on tight.

The reason for making sure the tape is on tight, and that the drum was completely free of oil before you began this whole process is that once the drum is loaded it is put back into the scanner where it spins. At very high RPM. An RPM that could totally destroy a piece of film.

One day a guy came into the camera store I worked in. This was immediately after I received my training on the Howtek. He was interested in the scanner and wanted a demo of it, which included me scanning one of his images so he could take it home and test the image. Most people just bring any old neg or chrome and test it out. Well this guy tried to smoke one past us and it sort of blew up right in his face.

A drum scan would cost you about 60 dollars, at least in 2001. But we did not charge anything for a demo scan, because we were trying to sell the scanner itself, not the scan. So a photographer came in and wanted us to scan this chrome for him, a 645 piece of color transparency film. Since it was a demo I did not feel the need to go through the oil mounting process described earlier and opted instead for a dry mount, which is a totally legit mounting procedure, provided of course that the drum was clean before hand. Which ours was not. It still had light traces of oil on it. I admit this was my fault. I didn’t clean the drum well enough from the last use. Nor did I notice that the drum was still a touch slippery in places.

So I load the drum with his one chrome, which was an image of a model wearing a red sweater against a white background. Not a great image, but obviously professional. I load the drum and begin scanning. The drum spins, the salesman is giving his talk and after the preview of the image comes up, I make some edits and hit “Scan”. Everyone is still smiling at this point as the drum begins to spin at over 240 RPM.

Then the very normal whirring sound of drum scanning abruptly changed into a sound that could best be described as the sound you get if you threw a CD into a paper shredder. At this point the smiles all went away. Since I loaded the piece of film without acetate and with only two pieces of tape on to a drum that still had traces of oil on it, the tape never fully adhered to the drum. At the high speed it was only a matter of time before the tape failed and the film collided with the inside of the scanner and got chopped into confetti. And when I opened the scanner that is exactly what this poor guys chrome looked like, little tiny pieces of emulsion except for the small jagged piece still attached to the drum that read “Fuji RDP”.

The salesman and I both wore expressions that said “you know thats too bad, but it was still kinda cool” while the poor guy who commissioned this demo had turned stark white and looked like he needed to sit down. He basically saw what happened, fought the urge to vomit and then walked out.

We couldn’t figure out why he reacted the way he did. After all it was just a test piece of film that he wanted scanned, some outtake from one of his shoots, right? Well no. My friend the salesman and I rather quickly realized that this guy had tried to get a pro quality scan on the cheap, and that this particular piece of film was the keeper from a live job he had yet to deliver. So all of his work in producing this picture of a girl in a nice red sweater evaporated in a cloud of film dust right before his very eyes. He then had to somehow tell his client that basically, the dog ate his homework.

I suppose this could be an argument in favor of digital, or at least in favor of paying for a scan. But what it really wound up being was hilarious. Maybe its cruel to laugh at someone’s utterly catastrophic turn of bad luck, but when you are trying to smoke one past us in such a sneaky and cheap matter, laughing doesn’t feel so bad.

And you can bet that when it came time to scan my own negatives on the same scanner, I taped the HELL out them first.

Tags: drum scanner, film

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