A Post For Mavs

[Antlerpeak]

My latest project has been to scan the 2 million or so 35mm slides into my pc to enhance and preserve the collection. A very time consuming and tedious project. Today I found a box of slides from my second Katahdin trip and thought of Mavs and his missing out on the knife edge. Well to whet the whistle so to speak I stuck the file online and put the link here. The route went up from Roaring Brook Campsite to Pamona then up the Knife Edge to Baxter. From there we went around to Hamlin then down to Roaring Brook.

I thought as I was looking at these that there is no doubt Katahdin is The Mountain. Oh yes! Neil look at slide #35 it shows two very large slides that I am sure you would love to jump on. Not sure what Mt it is, the view is to the NW of Katahdin I have no idea what that Mt is.

http://www.kodakgallery.com/BrowsePhotos.jsp?collid=82655757309&UV=285765539141_50155757309

[Antlerpeak]

Can you share the kind of scanner you're using? For 25 years I carried 2 Olympus camera bodies with a variety of lens. They went with me all over the ADK's, Catskills, NH, ME, VT, and on many trips out west.
I have between 10,000-12,000 Kodachrome slides, all labelled and sorted by-trip, by-region.
I've put off doing anything as I've been waiting for a scanner good enough to not lose clarity and show dust, but quick enough so that I can do 30-40 a day and eventually get them all done.
I'd prefer not to spend a fortune on a scanner, but have waited until I could scan with one where the scanned slide looks a lot like the original.

Thanks,
Peakbagr


Peakbagr

This thing does a decent job if anything they may come out a bit dark but Jasc Paint Shop Pro does a great job touching them up. It is a good bet that between the two you get a quality picture. Of course the larger the file you save them to the better.

The Scanner is a Visioneer One Touch 9220 USB It will scan negetives I have not tried that feature yet. Slides it does three at a time and if you use a high resolution which I'd reccommend it takes about five minutes to fully scan three slides to your hard drive. I bought this thing at New Egg I think it was about $59.00 So it was not expensive. I am very surprised at how good the thing is. I amjust wondering if the lamp will last for the duration and if not how much is a replacement. Can you get a replacement is the next question.

This thing will show the dust if you don't wipe the flat bed frequently. I have been wiping it after couple of scans or so. But if the bed is clean and your slides reasonably so you should be ok. Maddening because you don't see the bloody dust in the postage stamp sized thumbnail preview you have to look close. You will see some dust on some of the ones I scanned on that Katahdin trip but a rescan takes care of it. Like I said a few slip through and then you do em over or put up with it.

[Boreal Chickadee]

I'm a real novice at this but I'll tell you've what I've got.

I have an HP Scanjet 4070. It does slides and negatives also. 8 negative frames or 6 slides at a time. 2400 by 2400 dpi

Funny how we like to start with scanning our Katahdin slides first!

I've got a gazillion old slides and I want to preserve them and give copies of the CDs to my kids.

It's a very s...l...o...w process.

Dust particles that you can't even see turn into hummingbirds on the screen.

The afordable scanners for slides do a decent job if you stick to printing 4 by 6 prints from them or display them on the computer screen at less than full screen (mine's an 18 inch) but in order to get a really nice print enlargement you've got to go BIG BUCKS for a scanner specifically set up for that.

[Mavs00]

Scanners Smannners......................................... .

Those pics are truely awesome. Man, I gotta get back there. Really, I need to win the lotto and stop this working crap..... What with all these mountains out there. :)

[pete_hickey]

I've got a gazillion old slides and I want to preserve them and give copies of the CDs to my kids.

The lifetime os slides is known. Lifetime of CDs are unknown for two reason: wearing out, and obsolescent media. You'll have to go through the process of converting them to newer media every x years or so.... 7-track mag tape---9 track mag tape.....8" floppies..5-1/4 floppies...

Businesses which must preserve data have (should have) procedures for updating their archive media. Home memories in a shoebox don't. Don't be left with all your memories on vinyl with no turntable. Don'T ditch the slides.

[Nessmuk]

Businesses which must preserve data have (should have) procedures for updating their archive media. Home memories in a shoebox don't. Don't be left with all your memories on vinyl with no turntable. Don'T ditch the slides.The archivist who works at the NYS Museum is a friend of mine. He is responsible for the permanent archival storage of images documenting such things as archeological finds in NY State. His directive is to take 2 sets of photographs, in both black and white and in color, using old fashioned FILM only. Digital doesn't count, as the long term lifetime and reproducibility of film is well known, not so for ones and zeroes media. Ironically perhaps, not only does he make traces permanent, he is also a LNT master trainer.

[Antlerpeak]

Scanners Smannners......................................... .

Those pics are truely awesome. Man, I gotta get back there. Really, I need to win the lotto and stop this working crap..... What with all these mountains out there. :)

Mavs

I thought you would like to see those Knife Edge shots considering your experience out there this summer. As you can see the "edge" is walkable assuming you don't have a big blow. That summit north of Hamlin looks great too. Besides having done the thing myself I did not want you to forget and miss out on perhaps the most awesome hike the east has to offer. Oh and don't forget to check out Mahoosuc Notch that is beyond belief.

Pete

I am not going to ditch the slides but over time they do fade. So making two cd copies of each onto those less than trust worthy disks is rather cheap. Just time consuming with the scanning. The "zeros and ones" allow you to do quite a bit with the photos you can't do easily with slides. I took a cross section of Adirondack slides about 150 aligned into spring-summer-winter-fall segments. Then with a movie making program mixed a combination classical and rock music and throwing in some "Rocky Mt High". The program I have will match the slide duration to fit the timing of the music and burn it into DVD making a movie of the slide show. So my Seasons slide video plays about twenty minutes. It's too bad the Media Nazi's are so greedy they want to make a felony out of recording John Denver's music onto a video of your slides.

Nessmuk

I read sometime ago, Kodak had advised redoing your film archives periodically as well because various types of films deteriorate at different rates over time. So preserving the slides on digital will capture their present condition. How long they last is an unknown but since cds are cheap and once in that format take seconds to copy it seems like a viable alternative. One thing it does do is allow for easy viewing of the slides. Considering the cost of a projector bulb is approaching that of a used car it saves money as well.

[Nessmuk]

I read sometime ago, Kodak had advised redoing your film archives periodically as well because various types of films deteriorate at different rates over time. So preserving the slides on digital will capture their present condition.Oh yes, absolutely... I didn't mean to suggest you shouldn't digitize them. I suspect the NYS Museum not only stores archival photographs under very strict environmental conditions, but would inspect and renew the images when necessary. The technology to reproduce analog images will always exist in some format. It's just that current wisdom suggests you should not think storing everything on CD (or 8-track tape) will be the end all solution, especially for important documents.

I was given an Adirondack slide show with great personal meaning amongst a certain group of us. We thought it was lost, but the widow of the producer located it after several years in her basement. The slides all had severely color shifted to a strong blue cast. I color corrected each one manually in Photoshop and recovered almost the original color quality digitally. From now on that is only how the show can exist. I just have to make sure they get transferred to whatever the current technology is before CDs degrade or go obsolete. For us home shoebox slide show savers, digitizing is the only practical way to keep old color photographic images intact.

[Neil]

My mother recently observed that an entire generation's worth of pictures was being lost to the world because everyone shoots digital. Sharing images over the net is one thing but sitting side by side with my wife or my kids and flipping through a photo album is quite another experience alltogether. Nowadays I never have my pics printed. I'm not all that great about burning onto CD's so a crash would wipe out my last 3 or 4 months worth of pics.

[Boreal Chickadee]

these are all good things we should consider and now I really have so much work cut out for me to preserve these pictures.

Pete- Good reminder. I'll never throw the slides out. Showing them may become an issue becuase Kodak no longer supports through sales or repairs their projectors (so I was told by the rangers at Acadia).

Neil- I am very guilty of not backing up my digital photos. Got my camera last witner and haven't backed up anything yet. Truth is, I really don't know quite what is the most efficient way to handle this.

I recently had the thought that since i got the digital I've neglected my good 35mm film camera. Not good. I need to dig that out and use both formats.

The preserving of photos is pretty darn daunting. My slides are in pretty good condition but early prints are faded.

[Antlerpeak]

Boreal
Just my suggestion, burn them onto a cd but make two cds one for a back up when the first goes to cyber heaven.