I was heavily into photography as a hobby many years ago, but kind of let it fall by the wayside as kids and life took up most of my free time. Now that my children have gotten older and do not require as much constant attention, I'm trying to get back into it. Along with re-entering the hobby, I am also attempting to start a huge photo-related project with, hopefully, some business potential.
A long time ago, my wife and I inherited the entire photographic catalog of one of her relatives who was a very prolific and well-respected photographer, Fellow of the PSA, and world traveler. In this collection is more than 20,000 35mm slides from the 1940s-1970s from all of his world travels and photography projects. Many of his images are beautiful, gorgeous landscape and travel photos from far-off places including behind the Iron Curtain of the former USSR during the cold war in the 1970s when no Americans were really allowed into the country.
We are in the very beginning stages of preparing to digitize this slide collection in order to start building a prospective business with it. I could really use some good advice on how to get started with this digitizing effort. I need to very quickly digitize the slides and have both a lower-size preview of each image along with a full-size image that will be used for editing and printing. My main sticking point is which method of reproduction should I use to digitize these slides as quickly as possible but still capture the highest possible resolution I can, especially for the best of the best slides.
Would I be better off creating a setup using my DSLR camera, a dedicated slide scanner, a flatbed scanner, or some other method? I really want to get a good workflow set up for this project. What's giving me analysis paralysis right now is the fear of starting this project, getting several hundred or thousand slides into it, and suddenly realizing I had been capturing the images wrong all along and have to completely start over.
Thanks for any help, advice, or recommendations.
Thanks,
Robb
