I mostly use Leica rangefinder cameras: an M7 with Summicron 35/2 Asph and Apo-Summicron 50/2 Asph, and a 1961 M2 with Summicron 50/2. I also use a Contax RTS II, with Zeiss Distagon T* 25/2.8, Distagon T* 28/2, and Sonnar T* 85/2.8. Some old pictures were taken with a Minox GT and a Nikkormat FTN.

I scan film with a Nikon Super Coolscan 5000 ED driven by VueScan (professional version). VueScan allows a great deal of control of the scanner's settings. Sascha Steinhoff's book The VueScan Bible has helped me understand and exploit VueScan's capabilities. By constrast, the original software provided by Nikon was disappointing.

I scan colour slides at 4000dpi, with 24-bit color resolution. To reduce noise, I average pairs of adjacent pixels, effectively reducing the resolution by half. This procedure generates 8Mb image Tiff files with a resolution of 2000dpi and virtually no noise. VueScan offers some image processing capabilities, but I leave those to Adobe Lightroom, except for the very effective infrared dust removal.

After some experiments I concluded that, in the vast majority of cases, full resolution (4000dpi) or 48-bit colour depth do not result in improved image quality, only in larger files. (Those aiming at scans of archival quality will probably choose maximum resolution, raw format, and 48-bit colour depth on all four (RGB+infrared) channels. This is possible with VueScan.)

I mount slides on Reflecta or Gepe glassless CS frames. This format is ideal for storage, although the frame crops some 9% of the image. If I do require the full image I use Wess AHX500K slide mounts. Wess mounts also keep the film flat, due to special pins that fit into the film's perforations. This feature improves focusing accuracy in both scanning and projection. However, with a good scanner and appropriate settings, I haven't detected any difference in focusing accuracy between CS and Wess mounts.

After scanning, I import the files into Adobe Lightroom, 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. In spite of a high-quality scanner and colour calibration (I use the IT8 target V3 from Coloraid) I found that the very delicate tones that Leitz lenses can record on film are often difficult to reproduce in a digital medium. (You may take this as a statement of my limited colour-management skills.)

For publication on the web, I re-size the images with Lightroom (no point of exceeding the resolution of an HD screen: 1920 x 1080 pixels), and then I convert them to jpeg format with moderate compression.

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. The Epson's infrared dust removal facility 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 tends to get confused, cropping images in inappropriate ways. So I've often framed the area to be scanned manually.

In London, I use the excellent Metro Imaging lab for developing and printing, and Process Supplies for supplies. For online shopping, I have used the reliable ScanDig (Germany), as well as Silverprint and AgPhotographic (UK).