Within spitting distance of having all my slides scanned

About 2 1/2 years ago I purchased a Minolta Scan Elite 5400 and started in on

scanning my roughly 1800 color slide collection: family/walk around/vacation

shots going back to the mid-70's. This was my second project: I'd previously

scanned about 55 rolls of black and white, mostly Tri-X.

 

With the slides, I had a couple of mis-steps that necesitated restarting, after

getting about 1/3 of the way through. I also struggled with focus issues with

this scanner. The actual scanning was maybe 25% of my time, the remainder spent

largely in cleaning, reviewing color/brightness, creating finished jpegs,

contact sheets, burning DVD's, etcetera, etcetera.

 

The scanner is humming away right now, and there's maybe 1/2 dozen slides I

have left to do. There's an unsorted pack of culled slides that I may want to

scan a few of, and I've got a film sleave somewhere of culled slides in strip

format, actually some of the oldest stuff I have, home processed Ektachrome.

I'm looking forward to going through that. Still, just about done.

 

I hope my efforts will have a good run. I'll make sure all my kids get a copy,

and force everyone to endure a slide show. I will certainly cherise these

images.

Thanks for keeping us posted, Mendel -- perhaps the folks in the Digital Darkroom forum would like to hear from you, too.

 

The focus of our discussions here is usually the philosophical aspect of photography, rather than the more mechanical side of the pursuit.

 

I'm sure the family will get a kick out of seeing some of the real "oldies" in your collection!

I say its time to come out of the dark,into the sunshine, and shoot some more slides. :)

Documenting decades of lives has got me feeling philisophical, I'm not budging ;)

Too true, Michael. I *do* get out, with a dslr these days. But you can't get the past back.

 

Well, the last official scan is in-the-can. I've just been looking through my sleeved slides, about a rolls worth. There is something mind blowingly fresh in these. Familly shots. Some are out-takes from slides I've already scanned, but many I plain don't remember, haven't seen them in over 30 years.

It sounds like a sensible thing to do. Once your slides are scanned, you will have digital files that will allow you to use all of the current crop of digital photo editing tools.

Sure it takes time but it is worth it.

One benefit of using a scanner is that you can increase the resolution of your images if you upgrade your scanner. My first scanner was a 2400dpi and I scanned my negatives and slides and the resulting files came out a little larger than a 3Mp digital camera image. However, when I upgraded to a 4800dpi film/Slide scanner I had the option of taking my best shots and rescanning them at the higher resolution. (about 4400x3000 pixels image or @15Mp).

If I took a really great picture with a 3Mp digital camera and I upgrade to a 10, 12 or 15Mp dSLR, I can never increase the resolution of my original digital image. However, with the original slide, I can always rescan and get a new original (not an upsampled copy) at a higher resolution.

Hi Meryl. One of false starts on this project was to downsample, and to do it in less than optimum fashion. About the time I woke up on this, I decide I might as well stay with the native 5400 dpi my scanner offers. For many pictures it was overkill, I'm sure, but no matter. One some images I could see aditional detail that was getting lost, say downsampling from 5400 to 4000.

 

Anyway, thanks for responding. This is a 2 1/2 year effort for me, chronicalling decades of our lives, so I guess it has be a bit wound up nearing the end.

Yep, I've been going through a similar process with a new Nikon LS5000 + autofeed which takes them in batches of 50. The project was started by the need to give a "father of thr bride" speech which I wanted to do with a photographic backdrop. Luckily my younger daughter wanted a holiday job so she got through a good chunk of them. The problem, as you found, is the temptation to "optimise" the photos. This is especially as the double-depth (16 bit / colour) scan often initially looks too dark or light until the "gamma" curve has been adjusted. My solution has been to save the original scans onto DVD (twice) so I can go back and play with them when I have more time.

 

Unfortunately you don't have the original slides to go back to long-term as even Kodachromes from 35 years ago are beginning to fade and other faster emulsions are seriously losing shadow and highlight detail.

 

I agree there IS a philosophy angle to this - the value of returning to old photos and sometimes re-working them. I have found many that at the time I had practically discarded because of technical problems or subject matter which seemed at the time unimportant are now much more valuable because of Photoshop and the different perspective of now. The creative impulse at the time of taking the shot is only now finally coming to fruition with a contribution from the retrospective artist.

"One of false starts on this project was to downsample..."

 

I started (and finished) the same kind of project a few years ago.

 

Another false start is the tendency to scan just the "good" shots. A better mindset is that something like this is a conservancy project. At the least, do no harm.

Ellis has paid serious dues.

 

I paid mine in another way: I carefully and emotionally selected from among my family's turn-of-century and prewar negs and prints, carefully flatbed scanning and inkjet printing six archival folios, adding passed-along family recollections related to many of the shots, distributing the folios to son, nieces, sister and others. I learned a lot about my family that way. Hell with digital, somebody should bring back 116 and Kodak Autographics.

 

Maybe by distributing them, one folio will survive into the year 2100?

 

I'll leave the post-war stuff (55 years)to somebody else's mercies. My current B&W work gets edited, digitized, and printed. I don't care much about most of my previous work, including 15 years of professional portfolio. I'll bet I really care about 100 of my 20th century shots, and they've mostly been scanned on a casual basis (Nikon 4000ppi).

It will never be the same as from printing from your slides.

Congratulations on ensuring your memories via photography stay alive in a new medium.