Trying to copy some old slides

[Clovishound]

I ran across a box of slides I took back in the day. Most were probably taken on my Pentax ME. I tried my hand at a quick and dirty copy in camera using my flash for light and a double sheet of paper for a diffuser. Not happy with the results. Some if the issues may be the originals aren't that good, OK, that's a given. Some issues may be my method of copying. I believe I need to pay more attention to keeping the slide parallel to the sensor, as well as a better cleaning of the slides. Despite being in a metal slide storage box, they were very dusty.

What is your experience with copying old slides, and what did you use. I have a flatbed scanner, but thought copying with a camera would be preferable.

I like the subject and composition here. I fear the slide may have degraded somewhat over the years. It was shot on Kodachrome, so it shouldn't have degraded that much. It was taken in the late 70s. I ran it through Topaz and tried to improve the sky. I fear I made it worse.

One of the few slides I have showing the aircraft I was a crewmember on for nearly 2 decades. Obviously, that isn't me sitting on the wing. I'm standing in the overhead hatch taking the picture. Yeah, I got good focus on the leading edge of the wing, and not on my fellow crewmember. Still, I like the image, likely for nostalgia value. This was taken in the early 80s. I think it was taken at an airshow we participated in at Myrtle Beach AFB.

 

[Marilynne]

Check with @Sandpatch. I think he converts some of his yesteryear trains from slides.

 

[Needa]

I ran across a box of slides I took back in the day. Most were probably taken on my Pentax ME. I tried my hand at a quick and dirty copy in camera using my flash for light and a double sheet of paper for a diffuser. Not happy with the results. Some if the issues may be the originals aren't that good, OK, that's a given. Some issues may be my method of copying. I believe I need to pay more attention to keeping the slide parallel to the sensor, as well as a better cleaning of the slides. Despite being in a metal slide storage box, they were very dusty.

What is your experience with copying old slides, and what did you use. I have a flatbed scanner, but thought copying with a camera would be preferable.

I like the subject and composition here. I fear the slide may have degraded somewhat over the years. It was shot on Kodachrome, so it shouldn't have degraded that much. It was taken in the late 70s. I ran it through Topaz and tried to improve the sky. I fear I made it worse.

View attachment 409436


One of the few slides I have showing the aircraft I was a crewmember on for nearly 2 decades. Obviously, that isn't me sitting on the wing. I'm standing in the overhead hatch taking the picture. Yeah, I got good focus on the leading edge of the wing, and not on my fellow crewmember. Still, I like the image, likely for nostalgia value. This was taken in the early 80s. I think it was taken at an airshow we participated in at Myrtle Beach AFB.

View attachment 409437

Looks like the white balance is off. The first overall red tinge and the second a band through the image Maybe from the paper there are different brightnesses of white paper or uneven illumination?

 

[BF Hammer]

I have been so close to buying one of these a couple of times this past year. I kind of want something I can do Kodak 110 and 620 film negatives on also. Those would be my childhood cameras and I still have a stack of negatives around.

https://www.valoi.co/easy35

 

[Clovishound]

I could probably make something similar. Looks like slides would be easier than negatives. I need to look and see if I have enough slides I'd really want to copy to make it worth while. I found I have some I took in places like the Acropolis, Spain, Sicily and others. They really aren't that good, but some do have a certain je ne sais quoi Heck there are one or two of me back when I had hair.

 

[BF Hammer]

I almost forgot I bookmarked this older product. Guy in the UK makes them. Less expensive but you have to supply your own light source. That is a bigger trick to keep the color temp uniform from batch to batch than most people would expect.

https://clifforth.co.uk/#BUY

 

[Clovishound]

Well, I threw together a slide holder. It's a little fiddly and I probably should make another from something a little more solid. It does work though. I used my flash with a folded sheet of paper for a diffuser. In hind sight I should have used the mini soft box I have. Duhhhhh. Anyway here is another one I found. Yes, that's me checking the loading struts on a C-141. And yes, I had hair back then. Unfortunately, it was during the time when mustaches were popular. I'm more ashamed of that than I am bell bottoms.

 

[Blue439]

Interesting attempts. The last one is the best, obviously. I too, like many others, have hundreds of slides left over from way back when. A few years ago, I acquired the Nikon ES-2 kit to reproduce them on a digital SLR, and as the lens you were supposed to use it with was the 60mm Micro-Nikkor, I also acquired one copy of that secondhand. I never got around to tackling the slides, but I found that the little lens was a great performer and used it many times.

Keep us posted with your future attempts, I too may get to it at some point in the future (it feels like one of those great books you save for later...).

 

[BF Hammer]

You are getting there! Yes, use the soft-box and even place the lens directly on it pointing down. Should give uniform and consistent light that way so you could automate the post processing a bit.

Color is looking a bit flat, but understand it could be accurate due to the nature of military subjects. The little bit of red looks like you have room to increase saturation.

I got half-way into a project like this 20 years ago with one of those small USB cube film scanners. Similar principle, tiny digicam inside box aimed at a LED soft box. Slid the film through in a holder and captured jpegs. Unfortunately the light was so cheap it left rings of bright-dark across the photos that were very difficult to try to correct. It is why I keep looking for a scan adapter today.

 

[Clovishound]

I copied a couple more this morning. Many of them are very grainy. I don't remember my slides being that grainy back in the day. Maybe I was just used to grain when film was the only thing going. Topaz Denoise helps, and also gives a little sharpening. Hard to know for sure what are issues with the original image, and which are degradation over the years. These slides are around 45 years old. Some were taken with Kodachrome, some Agfachrome, and some, who knows what. I always preferred Kodachrome, but couldn't always afford it. The other issue is that I wasn't much of a photographer at the time. I'm still not much of a photographer, but have improved.

I find that editing them requires some new skillsets. I'm not entirely happy with all the results. I also notice that several looked better in LR, than the exported version look when posted here on the forum. For example, the first one seems a little too dark here. It seemed about right in LR or Photo Viewer.

 

[Peter7100]

Irrespective of if you are happy with these pictures or not, they tell a great story from the past and you should be proud of them.

 

[Clovishound]

That's the only reason I am interested in copying them. They document parts of my past, and bring back memories. I will have to say that I expected much worse, in terms of decent images. Mostly, I remember getting frustrated with the quality of my work in the last few years of my film photography days. About that time I got my SCUBA certification, and that quickly began to absorb all my interest and energy. I was much more satisfied with my ability to find shipwrecks, artifacts and fossils than my ability in photography at the time.

 

[Clovishound]

I reworked the slide holder and made it more sturdy. Tried making another copy of the first landscape.

Here's a couple more.

 

[Needa]

I reworked the slide holder and made it more sturdy. Tried making another copy of the first landscape.

View attachment 409473

Here's a couple more.

View attachment 409475View attachment 409474View attachment 409476

Thanks for posting I find these old photos interesting. You'll need to post an image of your setup.

 

[hark]

I have the Epson Perfection V600 Scanner which I used with my Windows 7 PC. I switched to using a Mac so I'll have to see if I can find drivers for it.

Although I never used it to scan slides, I did use it to scan negatives and photos. Plus I loved the option to scan as TIFF files. That allowed me to size up substantially. It worked exceptionally well for me.

EDIT: just wanted to add it looks like I purchased it in February 2011. The last time I remember using it was around 2017/2018 - but I still have it.

 

[Clovishound]

Thanks for posting I find these old photos interesting. You'll need to post an image of your setup.

Sorry, it's just a small box made from foamcore that snugly slips over the hood of my 105 micro. I put it together with duct tape and made a little slide in receptacle to put the slide in. It's rather crude, although it does seem to work. I probably should mount it on a tripod, but since the slide is for the most part locked in step with the camera, I've just been hand holding it in front of the small soft box. I can post a picture of it, if you want, but it is rather jury rigged. I don't expect to use it that much. I do enjoy making things from scratch when appropriate, and sometimes even when it isn't. Years ago, I made an underwater housing for a video camera, as I couldn't afford a commercially available one. I used off the shelf plumbing parts, and made a few critical items from plastic. It wasn't pretty, but I was able to get the underwater footage I was looking for. Now I could get a Gopro ready for the river for a fraction of what I spent on the video camera alone.

I did find out that AF works better than manually focusing, although if I use F11, focus probably isn't that critical.

 

[Blue439]

Some of those attempts came out quite well. You should describe what they show. Some of them obviously look like Italy.

 

[Clovishound]

Well, starting with the two prop driven fighter plane images, they were taken at an airshow in Omaha Nebraska. I was stationed there when I was on active duty with the Air Force.

The next was taken in Athens, Greece, either on, or near the Acropolis. This was several years later when I was in the AF Reserves serving as a loadmaster on C-141 cargo aircraft. Our aircraft was down with a bleed air duct leak (that was a knuckle-biter until we got it on the ground), and we had a day off waiting on parts.

The next set starts with a rural scene from northeastern Tennessee. The next is a scene from Rota Spain. We had a lot of missions that would give us 2 days off at Rota, so I got to know it fairly well. I was attracted to the Seat parked on the dock. Today, I would have made my way down to the lower level and shot much closer to the car and included more sky.

The indoor scene is at a mission in central California. My wife and I took a weekend trip to the mission country there with some friends.

The last was an iguana near the beach at GITMO. Those guys were everywhere! They weren't that shy around people.

These were all taken in the late 70s to mid 80s.

 

[Clovishound]

Well, I made another copy of one of the earlier posted slides using my updated holder. It turned out it wasn't out of focus as I initially thought. I think that it was misaligned, and shallow DOF resulted in only the bottom portion being in focus. I have been using Topaz Denoise, rather than Sharpen, and this seems to give better results. I'm beginning to believe that the heavy "grain" I'm seeing is actually slide degradation.

I believe this was taken at an airshow we had our C-141 on static display at Myrtle Beach SC back in the early 80s. I thoroughly enjoyed talking to the public about our aircraft and missions to members of the public who toured through the plane.

 

[Sandpatch]

Well, I made another copy of one of the earlier posted slides using my updated holder. ...

Your holder is yielding some great results! You have some nice shots.

With thousands of slides to scan, I bought an Epson V-800 about five years ago and am generally pleased with it, but dark slides often scan blurry.

I was talking to a photograper/author and he said scanning can sometimes be a fickle thing, with some slides scanning best on his Epson and others scanning best on his old Nikon Coolscan (which hasn't been made in years). Software has much to do with the final result; I use an old version of Corel PaintShop Pro. There's better stuff out there I'm sure. I'm glad that I kept the original unedited scans, as I've gotten better with the software and can always start from scratch, rather than having to rework an edited version or having to rescan the slide.