Slide Scan Setup

So I finally got off my duff and finished my slide scan setup and put it to some use!

As you can see in the first pic, I have a board with an extra tripod head mounted to it and I bought a little articulating vise that I used to hold the slides. I put some nickels in the jaws of the vise that allowed me to slip the cardboard slides in and out of the vise without opening it every time. At the far end, I had a bare lightbulb and used a sheet of white paper as a softbox to disperse the light. I used my 100mm macro lens on my new Canon 6D as the "scanner" and set a small aperture to maximize depth of field to help account for variation in slide distances (but at macro levels, the depth of field even at f14 is pretty shallow).

Overall it worked ok - I found that the slides were not always in the same spot, requiring an occasional refocusing, but not overly cumbersome - just needed my cheater reading glasses and a careful check of the live view camera LCD. I also think that my backlighting technique could have been better, but once you get started, it is hard to stop to rethink the lighting.

Although not perfect, this setup did what I wanted and met my goal of digitizing these slides into a format that allows our family to enjoy them. I did not struggle to maximize every inch of my 6D sensor (carefully centering each slide in the frame), instead opting for a bit of speed to get through the hundreds of slides. Subsequently, I have not taken the time to crop or post-process each picture carefully either, but the output is certainly viewable in a "snapshot" sort of way, which was my original intent.

This exercise confirmed a couple things for me; (1) Parents certainly take a lot of pictures of their first kid (haha!) and then the interest falls off precipitously thereafter and (2) Pictures without people and family in them are less interesting and compelling than the photographer thinks at the instant of shutter release. I find myself stumbling across this second one often. As photography is my hobby I don't take particular offense, but in reality I must recognize that the results of my "Wow what a beautiful mountain and lake! Where is my tripod, graduated neutral density filter and my polarizer?" will one day fall victim to a quick finger hovering over the "delete" key.

Special thanks to Dad and Mom for taking the time to snap pictures along our life's journey and for carefully storing these slides for over FIFTY years. There are lots of good memories in this stack.

I'm sending off a DVD copy of the files to my Mom & Dad and my brother to view at their leisure. It is amazing how time flies...

Here is a couple pictures just to whet your appetite.