Using the studio light as a light source


Tho I’m new to film scanning, I’ve been thinking about this for several years and now, I testing with what I have so far. I have Godox SL200II continuous light and it’s extremely powerful and have CRI 95. The setting was ISO 100, F11, 1/1000 at max power tho I can lower the brightness. Just for a testing purpose. The color tempt is fixed at 5600K.


I dont have a macro lens yet so I just tested with a standard zoom lens. I double diffused with a white acrylic panel and diffusing sock on a reflector. You might see some vignetting around the image but that’s because of the size of the reflector and it was enough to fit 4x5 sheet tho I would get a wide reflector for 4x5. I shot it with Sony a9ii and the shot was not proper but the quality was so great on 6x7 films.

For now, I only need to add a tripod Horizontal Panoramic Tripod Center Column from Leofoto and film holders for proper testing tho the setup is still in question as the head may not be leveled and sensitive to vibration and movement which is the most challenging part to solve unless I can make a frame to put the light inside as a small table.

Thoughts and concerns for possible issues?

I guess this ties in with your other ‘Equipment’ post about potentially using a Fuji GFX100 for commercial camera scanning. The advice there was to use a dedicated table with an aperture cut so that the light source would sit below and your film holder could be rotated through 90º. That would definitely be better than trying to use the reflector to support your film holder as in your picture, I see that it has a fan as well which isn’t ideal from that point of view. Otherwise your Godox SL200II should work well with such a setup but you’ll still need to make sure that very little light makes it to the film side of your scanning setup. Clearly the light is far more powerful than you need but you have it already and as you say the power can be turned down, apparently all the way to zero.

That Leofoto cross arm will work for now but it will be a fiddle to align and not as stable as a proper copy stand.