"In the beginning"

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The views expressed in this blog are not necessarily the views of the blog management, (on the other hand, they are not necessarily not the views of the blog management).

No effort has been made to stay within the bounds of the truth in this blog as it has always been the view of the management that the truth should never be allowed to stand in the way of a good story.

Monday, June 22, 2009

Slides by the thousand!!

This is what has been eating my time up lately.

My slides are stored in 10 of these wooden cases which hold about 500 slides each, as well as these there are numerous slide trays which fit into the projector, so as I said before the storage conditions have been close to ideal.

From the cases they go to the Canon MP980 where 4 at a time they are scanned, this takes about 3 or 4 minutes a batch so you can see where the time has been going.

This fortunately is a fairly rare case, the red blotches are a fungal growth that I have been unable to remove, just why some slides are affected and others from the same batch and case are not I have no idea.




A far more common case is where there are only a few spots which I have been able to fix.

Here the bottom of the photo has been cropped and some minor spots retouched.

We spent a day at the 1977 world parachuting championships (that's 32 years ago now) the photos from that day vary from over-exposed to under-exposed again for no reason that I know of.

An example of a photo that needed work on it

While this is far from perfect it is certainly better than it was above.

Pretty much a dark unrecognizable image here.

It becomes a lot better when tidied up a bit.

This sort of discoloration really spoils a photo.

It can be improved a lot by spending some time on it though.



Like the photos above these were taken on the same day with widely varying results, this one not too bad.

To this badly over-exposed one (none of the photos were stored in that condition BTW).

Fixable to some degree at least., but as I said ,it all takes time.

Another peculiarity using the Canon, each scan is referred to as a "crop" this in lots of cases results in the effect shown here.


When further cropped to remove the dark border the resultant slide becomes almost square instead of the original rectangular shape, now I'm gonna have to learn to speak Canonese as well as digital!!!

Christmas 1977 crossing the newly finished Westgate Bridge in Melbourne.

A lot better image here, I have since cropped the front of the F100 and bullbar out of this photo.

Hope that wasn't totally boring, I'm enjoying the project even though it is very monotonous at times.

8 comments:

Pamela said...

you have a treasure trove there.
We have bunches of slides that WR's aunt left when she died. We're thinking about putting them on DVD

Jack K. said...

I know the chore that is facing you. I also have slides that I should scan and place on a flash stick.

I have scanned some slides into the computer to put together a slide show for my MP officers' career course class a couple of years ago. It was a labor of love.

I need to get back to it.

I look forward to your future photo posting.

willowtree said...

You're doing great! I feel your pain, PhotoStudio isn't brilliant but it does clean them up a fair bit. Keep at it!

Dave said...

I find it interesting what you're doing Peter!

Great pictures... can't wait to see more.

Jeanette said...

Gday Peter, You have set yourself a task there with many hrs of work..but will be worth it in the end before they deteriate any further.look forward to seeing more as you post them

Shammickite said...

I have a metal box stuffed with slides up there in the cupboard, haven't looked at them for donkeys years, maybe I should get them out and see if they are still OK. Most of them date from when OlderSon was a littl'un, he's 37 now!
But I don't have a fancy slide skanning thingy so I have no idea how I would make copies... experiment I guess.

kenju said...

No wonder you haven't been around much!!

Christina said...

Wow, I definitelt can see where the time is going! You have really been able to improve some of those photos dramatically. How long do you think the whole project will take you?