Korrel is a professional scanning service and independent knowledge base run by Thor Vermin. It dedicated to high-quality digitisation of photographic film and other transparencies.

Who am I?
Hi, I’m Thor Vermin, a visual artist working primarily with photography.

My practice has always existed somewhere between two states: the analogue and the digital, the historical and the contemporary, the familiar and the unexplored. I’m interested in the tension between these worlds, and especially in finding ways for them to inform and enrich one another.

I have a background in science and later studied photography at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp. Photography has always felt like a natural meeting point between these two interests. It is both a technical and material medium, deeply rooted in history while continuously being reshaped by new technologies.

Working extensively with analogue photography, I eventually encountered a very practical problem: how to preserve, archive, and make accessible the large amount of film, negatives, and transparencies I had accumulated over the years. Digitising this material became a personal necessity, but it quickly grew into something much more interesting.

Knowledgebase
Since 2017, I have been exploring camera scanning as a way of digitising film. I was interested in finding better solutions to an old problem: how can a physical photographic negative or transparency be translated into a digital image without losing the qualities that make the original object valuable?
Over time, this resulted in a flexible system for producing very high-quality digital reproductions of photographic originals, while allowing the process to be adapted to different formats, materials, and desired results.

What interests me most is that many techniques that appear to be completely new are actually part of a much longer photographic history. Contemporary film digitisation may seem like a recent development, but it shares many principles with techniques that have existed for decades. The optical systems, light sources and reproduction methods of yesterday can still be found, in one form or another, in some of today's most advanced approaches to digitisation.

This continuity between old and new is one of the reasons I find film scanning so fascinating. It is not simply a matter of replacing analogue photography with digital technology. It is about understanding the history of image-making and using contemporary tools to extend it.

I created this knowledge base as an attempt to share what I have learned along the way. It is a collection of experiments, techniques, observations, and references that I hope can be useful to others interested in digitising photographic material. At the same time, I continue to follow the rapidly evolving world of film scanning and the many interesting projects and people developing new approaches.

Scanning as a service
Alongside the knowledge base, I offer professional digitisation transparencies including negatives, dia positives and glass plates.

The service is intended for photographers, artists, students, collectors, institutions and anyone looking to preserve or reproduce photographic material to a high standard. This can range from a selection of images being prepared for an exhibition or publication to larger collections requiring systematic digitisation.

I approach each project from the perspective of a photographer and visual artist, with attention to both the technical qualities of the reproduction and the character and history of the original.

More detailed information about the scanning process, available formats, resolution, workflow, and different scanning options can be found on the dedicated service page.

Get in touch
Whether you have an archive of negatives that needs to be digitised, a collection of glass plates that needs preserving, a body of work to prepare for an exhibition, or simply a question about film scanning, feel free to get in touch.

I’m always happy to exchange ideas, share knowledge, and talk about photography, film, scanning, and the many interesting points where analogue and digital image-making meet.