The Transparent Work Round - Part Three - A File With A Cake In It

  

The whole point of this week's exercise is to save those images on my colour slides. Unfortunately some of them are dead...and I'm afraid I killed them through ignorance.

I kept them for years in the boxes in which they had been returned from Coburg or Nunawading, and scrabbled around whenever I put up a slide show trying to locate the picures I wanted. Finally I bit the bullet and purchased hanging slide pages that went in a file cabinet - 24 slides per page. The collection sat in the dark and cool since the 60's. But I was foolish enough to choose PVC pages and they started to sweat and stick to the films.

Had I known, I would have gotten polypropylene pages. They have gotten a far better rating from the Wilhelm Institute for long-term storage. To amend the current situation, I've ordered 100 of the new type and will be transferring transparencies to them as I digitize them. In the process I hope to clean any muck off the slides.

The cleaner of choice will be the FVE film cleaner that our shop sells. I've used it on negs and transparencies for years and as long as you do not soak things in it, it does a good job of wiping grease and dust off - cotton Q swabs are the applicator with a microfibre cloth to finish off. I have not succumbed to cowboy advice to use cheap vodka instead of the FVE cleaner - I suppose it might be more cost effective in the end but I'd rather use cheap vodka to form political opinions.

Once the images have been put onto the SD card in JPEG and RAW form I will be passing them through this computer to try to correct defects. I have to admit that my exposure work in the film era was pretty hit and miss, so there will be a big variation in results in any one division. I would ideally like to put a page of slides through Lightroom and make use of the batch processing facility to right the wrongs, but the wrongs are all over the shop...

I may have to send them through one by one with Photoshop Elements 14 and just hope that the Auto Smart Fix helps enough with several clicks to do the job. The really bad ones will need the whole treatment - contrast, haze reduction, resupply of missing tones, etc. The Agfa CT 18 slides from the 70's seem to be the worst of the lot, and if they are too far gone to recover colour I am going to run them through the Alien Skin Exposure plug-in for a sort of funky monochrome.  The ones taken in  rather dirty London in the 70's were fairly monochromatic to begin with...

The final touch will be perhaps the most important. I have long been puzzling how to apply some sort of label to each image to record the location, circumstances, and people. Most experiments so far were too clumsy and slow for words. Then a client of CE explained the file details and the different divisions of information that are attached automatically to each JPEG. I found a section that invited the sort of commentary that I want to make that is hidden normally but indivisibly attached to any particular file. If I fill in one of the fields I have the electronic equivalent of a lead pencil note on the back of a print. It just needs the discipline to do it.

A project for the long hot summer months if we ever see them.

The Transparent Work Round - Part Two - We Slide On By...

Okay, you have your equipment assembled in a precise manner, as per our last posting...or in other words you have your lash-up lashed up. Now for the settings.

Most good mirrorless and DSLR cameras let you set your white balance with a number of manual choices. Past Auto you get Daylight, Shade, Flash, Underwater, etc. Avoid these - if you want to try to specify the white balance go to either Custom or Kelvin.

The Custom setting will let you take a picture of the light streaming through the slide aperture when there is no slide there. Go through the basic procedure as per your camera manual and you'll get pretty close to neutral.

If you elect to try to match the colour temperature of the light under your duplicator table with the Kelvin setting you may need to do it in a number of test shots. I found with the Metrolux that 6300ºK was pretty close but a further step in the Fujifilm settings took me to colour bias and I added 2 clicks of red and two clicks of blue. It is a case of purely subjective judgement once you look at it on the LCD screen. If you plan to treat the files later on with Lightroom you can add a biased look with batch processing and do much the same thing.

As the camera is looking at an illuminated transparency that may have light falling on it from the  general room fixtures, you want to either do your copying in a space that is free of this distraction - your old film darkroom for example - or at least reduce the spillage to avoid colour shift.

Decide in what form the card will record your file - if it is a pretty straight forward sort of a slide and you are using a camera like a Fujifilm that puts out an exceptionally good JPEG, you can go for that. Choose your target size before you shoot. If you are faced with a faded or shifted slide and will need to do a lot of post-processing to bring it to life, choose the RAW file. You'll need to work on it later but there will be a lot more latitude when you need to shift stuff about.

Note that there is considerable effect on the final output with vibration of the apparatus. I play it safe with an electric cable release...though you could use the self-timer facility of most cameras to damp things down. It's not really a case of the in-camera stabilisation being useful when all components in the chain are bolted firmly down, so check and see whether you need turn the OS , IS, VC, or VC off.

And then there is the business of cleaning the slide beforehand and identifying it later...next posting.

The Transparent Work-Round - Part One - All Uphill

We are always being given ways of working-round things on computers.

Some times what we are working around is an old computer - sometimes an old program. Sometimes

it is money - we find that cutting our coats to suit our cloth means we are wearing Barbie-sized coats...

In the case of this dodge, it is not because I do not own other equipment - it is a case of the time required to let that other equipment do its thing. I've stopwatched the process I am undertaking and I can cut the time required in half.

The project is the digitizing and rehousing of colour transparencies - mostly 35mm slides from the last 50 years. It isn't like I am doing Time - Life's collection - I counted only 7800 transparencies - but the time needed to clean them, scan them, correct the colours, and write their information into a JPEG file is going to be significant.

Don't get me wrong about the Epson V700 - V850's. They are fantastic scanners that translate older works from print, transparency, negative, or book very well indeed. There is no other really good economical answer for good scans from 4 x 5 sheet film. For that alone, it is worth the money. It also has templates and holders to scan mounted 35mm slides in batches of 12 on a pretty automatic basis. The problem is the amount of time it takes to do so for each image; counting loading, scanning, unloading, and sorting, you spend 3.5 minutes per slide. That is without noticeable correction time. A great portion of that time is taken up with the scanner doing a preview, then having to specify what size you want the output, then doing the actual scan.

7800 slides x 3.5 minutes =  455 hours...or roughly the time it takes to get a teenager to clean up their room. To be fair to the Epson, there is an automatic colour restoration circuit that can really revitalise some of the faded transparencies.

Well, there had to be a better way. The key to it was the collection of gear that was lying unused in the cupboard - specifically a Tokina 30mm macro lens on an adapter and a very old Novoflex focusing track. That and a Metrolux light box left over from surgery days and a cut off bit of Bunnings 12mm MDF board.

Remember the old days of the Bowens and Illumitran slide duplicators? Those wonderful boxes that let you put colour corrected light behind a transparency and then held a lens, bellows, and 35mm camera body above it so that you could re-photograph the slide? They were great - why, I'll bet that are a few lurking around the old storage shelves of Camera Electronic still...

Well, I could make up an MDF stand with a cutout the size of a 35mm slide, mount my Fujifilm X-T10 camera and the Tokina lens above it, and adjust the assembly up and down until the image exactly filled the screen of the Fujifilm. A macro lens that focuses close enough to do 1:1 is what I needed, though due to the nature of the APS-C sensor it did not go out to full 1:1 - I stopped in focus at 1:1.25.

The second part of this posting - tomorrow, I hope - will take you further into the settings and experiments to get good reproduction. In the meantime  think about whether you would like to do the same - Camera Electronic has some goodies that might help you to do the trick.

Well, I Was Wrong. And It Cost Me Money.

But that was a long time ago.

I was using a well-known name of SLR camera with well-known film. And a simple set of lenses - f:1.8, f:2.8, f:4. My slides were taken out in the open air and at medium f stops and about 1/250 of a second. And they were sharp and well-coloured.

As photography enthusiasts go, I went, and like many others was not satisfied with success. I lusted after the LX version of the camera and when I got it decided that the 55mm f:1.8 lens was not going to be as good as the 50mm f:1.2. So I traded it in and got a couple of boxes of colour negative film, and went out to take pictures in the twilight.

Not surprisingly, when I got back the results there was more grain in the image, the focus was not as sharp, and the postcard prints had none of the sparkle of the transparencies. I just knew it was the fault of the camera and the mens and sold it all off in a snit to buy the next hare-brained idea - a medium format press camera.

Older readers will detect where I went wrong - f:1.2 is not as sharp as f:8. Low light levels and shadows mean muddy shadows. Negative film has more grain than transparency film. Minilab prints can sometimes be minimal quality. But I convinced myself it was the fault of the camera.

Now I work in the trade and have taken more photos and looked at them. I realise my mistake. I spent out big and spent out wrong because I did not talk to someone in...the photo trade.

Going To The Square To Get Some Air - With Hasselblad and Fujifilm

I take pictures of belly dancers. It is a humble job but someone has to do it...I keep telling people...

Not surprisingly, dancers move around a lot - possibly to get away from the music. I, on the other hand, am fixed in place by the audience and have to stand there and endure it. Fortunately years of firing heavy rifles and cannon have reduced much of my hearing.

The visuals, however, are wonderful. Colourful is an inadequate word in the world of belly dance and Bollywood costuming. I have learned not to set the saturation of the jpegs on high as the cameras start emitting smoke. If the show is illuminated with a Fujifilm, Nikon, or Metz flash the colour return can be so intense as to require me to de-saturate it in the final image...and desaturation for me goes against my very nature.

This year's WAMED dance show at the South Perth Civic Centre will give me a larger foyer to play with and I can project my exhibition pictures with the wife's digital projector and this MacBook Pro. I've even got the old slide projector screen that so terrified audiences in the 1960's. So all is good.

Good-ish. Sort of good. Good-lite. I have the same problem that existed in the 35mm slide days - the format of the slide did not match the format of the square screen - Horizontal images left a white border top and bottom on screen and vertical images moved these blank spaces right and left.

When I projected 6 x 6 Hasselblad slides on the screen all was well - it looked perfect. Of course Hasselblad slides had the advantage of perfect lenses, too. Well, lenses aside, the 3:2 ration format of most of my 35mm and digital output is not going to do the same thing when they are projected.

I decided to dodge sideways. I've digitised a lot of the Hasselblad negs of the 1990's so they can come out square. I've started to search the image files of the last ten years to find the ones that can also be re-presented as squares. And I have discovered that - for this purpose - I have framed too tightly with the rectangular cameras.

I shall perform an experiment when taking the WAMED dance show images this year - oh, I'll be still balanced on a Pelican case in the middle of the crowd with the Fujifilm X-Pro1 camera and Metz flash supported on a Manfrotto monopod for four hours. I'll still hear the music...but I'll deliberately switch on Raw + Normal for the recording and 1:1 for the format ratio. If I'm correct the full 3:2 image should flood into the RAW file but the viewfinder and jpeg image should be going at 1:1. I'll keep single dancers in the square sights while settling the central green cross on the mid dancer in a line and the whole lot should be there in the RAW if I need it to spread across a 9:16 widescreen TV.

Well, that's the theory. I'll test it out in the next few days and report back. Who said digital photography isn't rocket science? Goddard? Von Braun?