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.