When people on Photrio encounter problems with their films, they often try to either describe those problems or they attempt to share the results in the form of scans. In response, they often read something like "please show us the negatives or transparencies". This resource is intended to show what that means.
To do this, it is helpful to have a decent backlight for the film, something that film can rest flat on in front of that backlight, and a digital camera that allows focusing close...
It'd probably be helpful to mask the pixels with a thin sheet of paper or a diffused plastic on top of laptop screen as that pixel grid is VERY distracting - especially when it comes to detail/emulsion defect discussion.
If one has a broken LCD monitor - it's easy to remove the image-making part out of display assembly and just use the backlight part as a very decent DIY lightbox.
MODERATOR/OP EDIT: See post #7 - the images have been replaced now with better ones
Points taken. I'm going to futz a bit with this, and with my moderator (not so super) powers, you may see those images swapped out with replacements sometime relatively soon.
For this purpose, I think it is better to have some blank, unmasked area outside the film, so we can see the comparison, and therefore better gauge things like level of fog.
Everybody likely differs (widely!) with their established or preferred methodology for viewing negs/transparencies.
As a beginner almost five decades ago, I used a whale-oil lamp in my parents' beach shack to view, wide eyed and in wonder, my first efforts with early Ektachrome and Kodachrome slides!
I occasionally view transparencies on a simple "lightbox" app on my phone or tablet when I'm away from the man cave. In a plane at 13,000m commuting, holding up slides by the window to the big blue sky outside works a treat too — but getting a snap of them against those irksome windows is not so straightforward.
Otherwise, locked away and in darkness — cutting out all reflected and ambient light is something I enforce when viewing opaque-masked transparencies on a neutral, colour-corrected OLED lightbox. I used a simple and cheap A3 tracing lightbox for a few years before upgrading.
One useful trick to holding negs/strip transparencies down on the lightbox (when removed from the carrier sleeve) is the use a sheet of clear, antireflection OHP presentation media: place the strip of negs/trans beneath and tape down the sheet. The slight warmth of the lightbox will assist in flattening any pronounced curl.
Sure. However, note that this is specifically about how to include some useful illustrations when people are asking technical questions about e.g. film processing and defects. In this scenario you generally don't want to show anything that's masked or framed.