Well, I've archived over 500 shots this weekend and it's working really well. Since you asked, here's exactly how I did it :-)
* Tripod with legs barely extended, splayed wide for stability so the camera body is only about 40cm off the ground. Fully-adjustable ball head and/or horizontal centre column. I use a Manfrotto 190 with standard rubber feet.
* DSLR with a macro lens with 1:1 capability - or near enough - pointing straight down (use a spirit level on the screen.)
* Lightbox - I got a tiny lightbox (size of a small paperback book) from the clearance bin at Jessops in London. I chose a small one for cost (didn't want to waste much money on an experiment) and the fact that my apartment is small and cluttered. In fact, the box's small size turned out to be an asset during shooting, as you'll see.
As I was set up on the wooden floor, I needed so sit on the floor for extended periods so a cushion was necessary :-) If you can set up on a low coffee table so that it's comfortable to sit on a chair while you peer through the viewfinder then that may be a better solution. Don't set up on a carpet or rug - you need a hard, smooth surface. Also remember to set up somewhere fairly shady and without overhead lighting. Reflections from the surface of the lightbox or negative will ruin the shot.
Here's how it looked:
* Fiddle endlessly with the tripod to get the focus and framing exactly right - you want to capture the full frame plus a little of the surrounding area. Without a little room to maneuvre you'll spend ages framing each shot to avoid slicing off bits of the frame. If you have a lot of negatives to get through you'll regret it. On the other hand, the more megapixels you have in the actual negative the better the resolution. With ISO 100 consumer colour print film I found the grain to be quite a bit bigger than the pixels on my 8MP 20D, so a 10% margin all round was fine. This part is tedious but crucial. I used my trusty old 20D so that it could be left set up for a few days without interfering with my normal shooting. If you only have one camera body then make sure you have a quick-release plate so you don't have to fiddle with the tripod or head between sessions, it'll drive you crazy. Failing that, or if you can't leave the tripod set up in between sessions, measure the leg extensions and head height and make notes so they're easier to replicate later.
* Focus on a negative, switch to manual focus and tweak until you're sure it's a sharp as possible.
* Set the ISO to 100 and take some shots of blank and non-blank negatives to determine the required exposure very carefully. You want to 'expose to the right' but without any possibility of blown highlights in the negative itself. Some/most of the sprocket holes will blow out (and flash during histogram review) if you're doing it right. Bear in mind that the base colour of different films varies quite a lot, so be cautious and do your experimentation on one of the lightest films you have - Agfacolour for example is a light lilac colour, whereas some of the Kodacolour films are a deep orange. You won't have the patience to check the histogram with every shot, and blown highlights are impossible to recover. On the other hand, I suppose, they translate to 'blown blacks' so the effect isn't disastrous - you'll probably find the dark parts of the shot pretty ugly anyway if you've got used to digital. Anyway, I digress. Once you've calculated the correct exposure, use manual mode with the aperture on the lens set to f/8-f/16. The shutter speed will work out somewhere between 1/10 and 1s unless you have a weird lightbox. You need the small aperture for decent depth of field - some negatives are a bit curved and although you can reduce that by flattening the frames either side you risk scratching them and will slow yourself down. The curvature's correctible in post processing, unless it's really extreme. Flattening with a glass sheet, by the way, is not recommended. Not only do you reduce contrast and risk scratches, you also risk interference patterns ('Newton's rings') from the trapped air layer, which are really ugly.
* Set capture mode to Raw+smallest jpg.
* Take a shot of a blank neg and set the white balance to 'custom' and use this as the reference point. It doesn't matter for the raw shot but the thumbnail jpgs will look nicer 'out of the box'.
* If you haven't worked with film for a while I should remind you of the vulnerability of negatives to scratches and fingerprints. Individual shots can also be messed up by dust and hairs and you might not see them throught the viewfinder. Keep a rocket blower handy, keep your gear clean and wash & dry your hands regularly. Cool clothing helps reduce hand sweat too.
* Set 'Mirror Lockup' to ON in your Custom Functions menu and set the drive mode to Self Timer. On my 20D it defaults to a 2s delay which is perfect.
* Try to get the orientation of the neg strip correct before shooting. It's not much effort to flip/rotate the files on the computer but it's almost zero to get it right first time.
* Shoot a whole film and then go to the computer and do your final checks for highlights, pixel-peeping for sharpness (i.e. focus and/or shake). During shooting I found positioning the negatives to be fairly easy if I just dropped the strips onto the light box 'any old how' and then fine-tuned the position by moving and rotating the lightbox itself. It's much easier to be precise and avoids too much touching of the negative. This is the reason that a small lightbox is better - you don't want it knocking your tripod legs or needing two hands to move because you'll have one hand on the shutter most of the time. Try to ensure the edges of the negative and viewfinder frames are close to parallel - rotating shots by a degree here and a degree there is a pain.
Here's an example jpg straight from the camera:
* On the computer, batch invert all the jpgs so you have 'thumbnails' that can be understood without the need for LSD, and leave the raw files alone. Resist the temptation to fiddle with the raw files before they've been properly archived and backed up.
* Be organised - shoot a whole film, then put the negs back in their sleeves and file them away in a separate place so they don't get mixed up with the yet-to-be-shot ones. Same goes for putting them in separate directories/folders on the computer. When you get in the groove you'll be churning through a 36-exp film every 3-4 minutes, so the shots quickly mount up. Shoot on two different memory cards so one is downloading while the other is being shot.
So, how to produce the finished article? Open up a raw file, invert it, adjust the exposure with reference to the histogram and then fix the colours, which will have a pronounced blue cast. I found the 'black dropper' (using the unexposed frame edge if necessary) and 'white dropper' to be sufficient for 95% of the shots, with only occasional recourse to more careful channel adjustment needed for some of my very oldest films.
Here is the finished product, processed from the raw file of the jpg above:
Beats paying money for a big slow scanner you might never use again (and fighting with crappy software, for that matter). Let me know if you have any questions, and feel free to add your own tips.
