1967, a girl, a ball

ca. 1967, a girl, a ball
Originally uploaded by mcmrbt.

Less than 100 slides reside in my dad's box. I haven't looked at them for years, and I think it's true to say that, in any event, these pictures have never been viewed properly, at sizes bigger than the old hand-held viewer, which was all we had.

My dad was attempting to view the slides with the old viewer the other day, but things have not been stored well, and the viewer was corroded beyond repair, with an absent bulb.

So I offered to take the slides home and see what I could do. It was upsetting that almost every single one of them was in a cardboard slide holder that was falling apart. Many of the slides were badly faded (most to red, some to black), and a lot of them were damaged and dirty, too.

These are pictures that date from 1963, the earliest, to about 1975 or 1976. After that, I think my dad stopped using the old 127 format camera (which produces a 4x4 print or transparency) and switched to 35 mm film.

So that's the size of the job: 90 slides, covering around 13 years of family history, falling apart, badly damaged by time and neglect.

First thing I thought to do was buy a slide scanner. But a decent one costs around £400, which is a lot to spend for a one-off job. I could have done it, and would have done, but it's been a bad couple of months for the credit card, what with one thing and another.

Epson do a range of Photo flatbed scanners, which feature transparency capability. One of those is less than £100, so I got one and set it all up. Two disappointments there: the results weren't very good, not particularly sharp, which I could indicate a problem with the originals, and the scanner I bought was only capable of scanning the equivalent of a 35mm frame. No good.

The real show stopper was the speed, though. It would only do (part of) one slide at a time, and that very very slowly. So that went back, and I decided - after experimentation - to use the one at work. Though missing some bits, I was able to do up to 4 slides at a time. Still took ages, but it meant that around 25 jobs netted me two DVDs worth of uncorrected originals.

From retrophotographic.com, I ordered some original 60s stock 4x4 glass slide mounts, and I've remounted the slides in those.

James from work has helped a bit - especially with some of the worst examples - but my plan now is to go through them all, restore them as best I can (see above), and then produce DVD slide shows and possibly iPhoto books (got one of the new iPhoto 5 softcover books yesterday, and they're quite nice).

I've also bought a licence for Photo To Movie, which gives you Ken Morse/Burns rostrum camera effects that are superior to those you can do in iMovie. It means, for example, you can move properly about within a frame, and pause when you want to etc. Worth checking out if you find the iMovie Ken Burns effect to be a bit limiting.