How does it work?
It’s as easy as the name – NOSSAFLEX has all of the information in the title.
NO = Number
SS = Shutter Speed
A = Aperture
FL = Focal Length
EX = Exposure
You write these down in this order and then translate that information across to the file name of your film scans. That way, every time you look at your photos you know exactly what your settings were.
It’s helped us organise our scans, and also learn from them. Sometimes we completely forget about a shot only to look at our settings and be surprised we could handhold our camera at 1/15th!
Scroll down for some in-action examples.
Watch the video explanation:
The system in-action
NO03_SS250_A8_FL80_EX0
The Number references the order it was taken in, it’s purely for organising your film scans in order so you know which shot you are referencing.
NO06_SS10s_A22_FL80_EX0
The Shutter Speed, Aperture and Focal Length are all self-explanatory and you can write these exactly as they appear on your camera.
NO34_SS30_A2.8_FL35_EX+1
The Exposure is referencing how much over or under-exposed you decided to shoot depending on what your light meter said.
Want to give the system a go? Head over to our tools page and grab some free PDFs.
Great, but where’s my film stock?
Ahhh yes, we’ve sorted the other metadata but not this…
Well, you need to store all of your film scans somewhere right?
That somewhere is usually a folder. So let’s use the folder name to give us everything we aren’t putting into our file name.
We found it easiest to have our folders labelled like this:
“Roll 006 – Portra 400 @ 200 (135) – Nikon F6”
Beginning with our Roll Number (Roll 006), then the Film Stock (Portra 400) – which also denotes “@ 200” to signify we set our light meter to 200 and not the recommended 400 of the film stock – then the size of the film (135), and finally the camera we used.
Remember, this is all a guide. This is how we personally use this information to name everything, but if you prefer having different information such as date shot, location or even multiple cameras (if you double exposed the film), then make up your own naming conventions!
Spicy tips.
There’s the very unlikely (but slightly likely) situation where you could get two identical file names. They won’t be in the same folder, but nonetheless they won’t be unique. So, there’s a few extra things you can do to set these file names apart.
Roll Number.
Adding ‘RN001’ (Roll Number 001) to the beginning of your file name will make this unique with every other picture you take since you cannot have the same Roll Number.
Point & Shoot
Since point and shoots have automatic values for shutter speed and aperture just write ‘auto’ in the filename. eg. NO01_SSauto_Aauto_FL35_EX0.jpg
Seconds.
If you have exposures that creep into the ‘seconds’ just add an ‘s’. So 6 seconds would be ‘6s’