I am using a 35mm film camera and the manual says I must either use full frame prints or I need to put the Film Plane Insert in my camera. What if I don’t want to do either?

The PhotoModeler user manual is a bit misleading in this regard as it is written to help people get the best possible measurement accuracy. To get the best accuracy with film and any photogrammetry software you need to recover the relationship between the film and the camera. Fiducials (insert or frame corners) help the program do this. Photogrammetry software has used these sorts of fiducials for years to help improve accuracy.But… in PhotoModeler you can often get very good results with a film camera without going to any of this trouble. In fact some of the models shown on our example pages are done this way. The best way to use a film camera without the insert and without full-frame prints is to use Kodak’s PhotoCD scanning. In particular, using the Auto-gate scanning (where they scan your whole 36 negative film strip all at once) gives the best results.You can also get reasonable results by scanning prints on a flatbed scanner as long as you do not rotate or crop the prints and you scan each print exactly the same way.We have a number of customers that use these methods exclusively and have never gone to full-frame prints, full-frame scanning, or the film plane insert, and they get results with which they are very happy.