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.

1984 - George Orwell's Vacation Slides

What do Erich Honecker, Helmut Kohl, and these boxes of Agfachrome have in common?

They were all available in Germany in 1984. Erich's handed in his dinner pail, Helmut is in a wheel chair, but these slide films are just as good as they always were.

Of course, that begs the question of just how good the always were, and I am here to tell you that they weren't. I have a filing cabinet full of Agfa colour slides at home carefully separated and stored in archival sleeves. They are in a climate-controlled environment and are kept safe from UV rays, fungus, and insects. Nearly all of them are horrible.

The Agfa slide mounts of the period were great - blue and white plastic mounts with rounded edged and a sturdy profile. They were returned to us from the processing plant in Nunawading, Victoria in a good orange plastic box - it was a class presentation all the way. Kodak used cardboard mounts and difficult little boxes and you felt that you were getting second best...

Little did we realise that the dyes used in the Agfa product were fugitive, and would leave of their own accord, no matter how we stored the things. Most, if not all of the Agfa CT18 slides I have are decoloured - they are magenta-tinted and almost un-viewable. I can recover a little of the scene with digital colourisation, but never reliably and never well.

Bummer.

Well, we found six boxes of these little chromatic hand grenades at the back of a cabinet. They are unused, dated for 1984, and horribly tempting. The internet says that this film can be processed in E-6 chemistry but 31 years is 31 years and I suspect these contain as much art as science right now. Inadvertent art, if you will.

Make us an offer. Pull the pin on these and see what happens. Don't blame us if the owner of the mini-lab you try to process them in chases you through the streets with a pitchfork. We have no idea what will happen...

PS: No more Nunawading. Yer on yer own.

Kodachrome III At The Car Show

Those of you who are feeling the chill of winter settling into your bones would be well advised to visit the Swan Valley on any Sunday in January. The open areas, the reflective grass, and he lack of wind will serve to concentrate the heat for you. Should you be out in the direct rays of the sun at 12:00 you will get the full benefit. As it was, yesterday the mad dogs and the Englishmen were sitting in the shade with cold drinks while the rest of us - the car enthusiasts - strode manfully round the paddocks and fried.

In my case it was all science - I was trying out the new Classic Chrome jpeg setting in my Fujifilm X-E2 camera and seeing if I could get the camera and the Fujifilm EF 42 flash to adequately cope with the contrast glare. Those of you who follow this  shop blog or my own " Here All Week" blog at hrhoa.wordpress.com will know that the Fujifilm X-100 cameras and the EF 42 flash are well able to do the mid-day shoots, but this time it was the turn of the X-E2.

The Classic Chrome was a gift from Fujifilm in a Cristmas-time firmware upgrade. Together with interval shooting and control from my iPad ( Which works quite well.) it is an addition to the insides that you can put in yourself.

Classic Chrome? Well, they already have some film-simulation settings in all their cameras that replicate Fujifilm transparency films pretty well - Provia, Velvia, and Astia are in there if you look for them. I don't think they are going to say the K word for legal reasons, but quite frankly that is the look that is coming out of this setting - and I am prepared to cheer them on.

I have decades of Kodachrome and Ektachrome slides in my library - as well as Ansco, Ward, Sears, Agfa, Ferrania, and Perutz films. Some started out well but have gone all manky - the Agfa are worst for fugitive dies. Some started out horrible and have stayed that way - Ansco and Ferrania come to mind. Some have started out well and remain so to this day - The Kodachrome slides are still colourful and accurate. Surprisingly, so are the cheapies I got from Montgomery Ward in the 1960's - Pure luck, I suppose.

Point is, I have direct examples to compare the new files to. I think that Fujifilm have done us a signal service in this upgrade as it means that we can recreate the 60's look digitally.

I am not saying it is the most accurate look at colour - it never was. It deals with contrast differently than standard digital outputs. Colours can be muted in some segments of the spectrum, and intense in others. Shadows can be well handled but some highlights can blow - well, that is what what Kodachrome did and what everything does in the Swan Valley on a summer Sunday. No cloud + white car tops + chrome bumpers = blowout. Boom. If you want to avoid this bring your own cumulo nimbus and park it over Midland.

Into retro? Try Classic Chrome. I love it - I love it a lot.

Dear Old Colour Slide Film - In Our Dear Old Fridge

If you are dedicated to 35mm photography and the classic days of the colour slide may we offer you the services of our film fridge?

Currently I see Fujichrome film there in pro-packs. It is fresh, cold, and colourful. All you need to complete the retro experience is a new Leica M-A, a safari suit, and tickets to Fiji.

Or Fujiyama. Same as Fiji but the air is a bit fresher on top...