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Keith DeCristo 4/16/25 Keith DeCristo 4/16/25

A Film Fanatic Is Keeping It Real- Keith DeCristo’s Analog To AI Workflow.

“In a dark room, the flatbed glows gently between the lid and glass.

And when the scan begins, it’s not just movement—it’s performance.

The light glides under the negative, casting animated shadows across the walls and ceiling like some kind of analog puppet show.

You watch it pass under faces—old, familiar, forgotten—and they don’t look like portraits.

They look like apparitions.”

Where film meets Firefly—one photographer reclaims 20 years of analog and turns it into a post-human memory machine.

Poster-style graphic of A Film Fanatic is Keeping it Real - featuring legacy lookbooks and analog gear — *A Film Fanatic is Keeping it Real | fckinphotoblg*

Nostalgia won’t lie.

Dust on lens, truth in the grain.

I shoot what I feel.

Fashion model Pamela with voluminous flowing hair and a patterned headscarf poses with hand to face, photographed on Kodak Portra 400 using a 6x7 medium format camera. — *Portrait of Model(Pamela) in Vintage Headscarf – Shot on Kodak Portra 400 6x7*

A smiling Black woman with a towering vintage hairdo and blazer, photographed on 35mm Kodak Ektachrome — *Nikon F2 Nikkor 105mm f2.0 | Kodak Ektachrome*

Fear, Loathing, and Flatbeds

It started with the quiet.

Not the usual kind—the lull between traffic or the hush that blankets New York before a storm. This was the stillness of something larger: an emptying out. The city’s natural roar replaced by birdsong and low-frequency booms no one could place.

This was May 6, 2020. Lockdown season. The time when you’d hear the subway… or hope that’s what it was. Ambulances screamed past windows, and your neighbors—all masked—became strangers with the same sad eyes. The entire city felt like a Hopper painting, while your brain was a chaos scroll of news, panic, and expired Clorox.

Me? I bought a scanner.

Natasha Komis in white halter set and trench coat, cigarette in hand, posed in a wooden alleyway — *Natasha Komis – Alleyway Attitude | Mamiya RB67, Fujichrome Provia*

The Workflow Is the Therapy

There’s a ritual to waking a flatbed scanner from slumber.

Power on. Status light flashes. The transport motors run forward, reverse, alignment check. Tubes begin warming up. Fifteen seconds later: solid green. A friendly beep. And in the dark of the room, the scanner glows softly from beneath the lid like an altar just lit.

As the CCD tube glides back and forth, the light creates animated shadows across your workspace—faintly flickering like ghosts pacing in their cell. Faces on film begin to emerge, spectral and slow, and you realize the scanner isn’t just converting—it’s summoning.

The sound the motors make when the scan ends and the transport resets at 3x speed? You hear it in the next room. It’s the hum of memory being excavated.

A fierce redhead in a corset and bold mohawk, captured on 35mm film in a powerful stance — *Ellen – Nikon F2, Nikkor 105mm f2 | Kodak Ekachrome*

Here’s the setup:

- Epson V600 Photo

- Epson Transparency Adapter

- Datacolor Spyder Color Calibration Tool

- Dual BenQ 32” Production Monitors

- Panasonic BT-18U (for video stills)

- Horseman 7x Magnifying Loupe

- Rinn X-Ray Viewing Station (retro-fitted with 5500K "movietones")

- Staticmaster Dust Removal Brush

Software

- SilverFast 8

- Adobe Photoshop 2023 (with Firefly)

- Luminar 4

- macOS on M-series with integrated graphics

The results? Controlled chaos. Nostalgic pixels. And a reminder that some ghosts prefer to be scanned at 2400dpi.

Black-and-white photo of a skater girl with flowing hair, posed on a skateboard in front of graffiti — Kirsten – Skater Girlz Editorial | Mamiya RB67 90mm SEKOR | KODAK Tri-X 400

Why Firefly Works (When It Shouldn’t)

At first, I used Adobe Firefly with suspicion. Too slick. Too fast. Too… eager.

But that changed.

Once cooler heads prevailed and I got better with the syntax, I discovered something Firefly does remarkably well—something that’s rarely talked about and even more rarely achieved in digital augmentation: it honors the light.

It doesn’t override your lighting plan. It respects it. Whether you’re bouncing an 8x or dialing in a tabletop source, Firefly expands your frame like a second shooter who actually read the lighting diagram. Same position. Same temperature. Same mood. Same you.

Which is why I keep using it.

Not because it replaces art direction, or collaboration, or the priceless weirdness of real-world production chaos. But because when used with intention, it becomes a kind of alchemy—taking scanned celluloid and broken pixels and conjuring up something worthy of calling art.

That, and it never eats your catering or tries to explain NFTs.