After development hang up the negative roll to dry in a relatively dust-free room (no open windows, some running water ideally). Use a microfibre duster and maybe some diluted isopropyl alcohol to clean work surfaces and equipment.
Then use sharp scissors to cut a six-frame strip from the start of the roll and place it in a negative holder. This goes on a light box, on top of a piece of thick black card with a 24mm x 36mm hole cut in it (to exclude some stray light from the rest of the light box).
Set up a DSLR on a tripod facing directly down onto the lightbox with a 1:1 macro lens attached. Use a bubble to get the camera as level as possible, then adjust focus until there’s visible grain and it’s as sharp as possible. Try and maintain even grain sharpness across the negative, not just in one area – this means your camera is properly level.
Then start taking photos of each negative, using a remote to avoid camera shake. I usually use 0.6s exposure time at f11 (narrow aperture to deal with any imperfect flatness – I might switch to f8 because it’s more in the middle of the lens’ sharpness window), but this is specific to my general set up.
Once the six-frame strip’s done, I file it in a folder of 35mm negative holding sheets and move on to the next one, until I’ve finished the roll.
Digital processing
I use Darktable to organise and process photos because it’s open source, free, and better than commercial alternatives like Lightroom.
My basic philosophy for digitally processing film is to avoid doing anything I couldn’t recreate in the darkroom using analogue printing. This means if I find some digital settings that produce a nice image, I can translate those to analogue and make a nice print (I don’t have a printer for digital files).
The first thing to do is invert the negatives. Use the Negadoctor tool. Select black and white (default is colour), and use the colour picker to select an area that just shows the colour of the bare film – somewhere near the sprocket holes, outside the image. Adjust scan exposure bias, D min/max, paper grade, and print exposure adjustment.
Now make the images actually monochrome – you don’t have to do this, but if you want the pictures to look like they would if they were traditionally printed with standard techniques, you probably want to.
Use rotate and perspective to make sure your images are level, then use crop (set to ‘original image’ proportions) to crop the images down so just the part you want to show is included. Again, this is down to taste; sometimes people like to include sprocket holes, and sometimes an image benefits from cropping out certain elements to improve composition. All this can also be achieved in the analogue darkroom, so it doesn’t conflict with my goals here.
Dodging and burning are simple to achieve in Darktable, but it’s a much more technical activity than the analogue equivalent. Usually I restrict this to dropping overexposed skies by about half a stop, which is something you can do in the darkroom with a bit of cardboard (or just your hands) and a watch.
At this stage, the processing’s done, and all that remains is to tag all the digitised images with subject, rough dates, and film type. Then I go through the digitised images and give each a star rating, out of 5 – zero is usually a development fuck up or an accidental shutter release, one is uninteresting, two has something but also flaws, three is a serviceable photo, four’s something I’d consider printing, and five’s something I’d hang up.