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Re: [OM] IMG: Family Kodachromes, 1950-53

Subject: Re: [OM] IMG: Family Kodachromes, 1950-53
From: Moose <olymoose@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Mon, 22 Feb 2016 21:45:42 -0800
What great fun, to get those old family snaps digitized! I had fun spinning 
through them.

On 2/22/2016 6:38 PM, Peter Klein wrote:
Thanks for the feedback, Chuck: The ES-1 slide copier is advertised to work with Nikon full-frame macro lenses of 50 or 60mm. Micro 4/3 is about 2x, so I couldn't use my 50/3.5 OM macro, which would be 100 equivalent. Too bad. I'd need several inches of extension between the lens and the ES-1. A standard 4/3 Olympus macro of 35/3.5 is still available, which is reasonably priced today and might work if it's not too long for the ES-1. There's also a Panasonic micro 4/3 30/2.8 macro which I know will work, because a friend uses it. But it lists for just under $400.

Wow, that gets complicated. It projects like that that make my head hurt. Fortunately, I've accumulated a lot of macro gear, lenses, bellows, tubes, etc. so I can set up pretty much any magnification I want. I think, though, that I'd prefer a copy stand or tripod and one of those inexpensive 4x5" "light tables to working with the Nikon thingie that makes the set-up so hard. Kinda backwards to be looking at multi hundred $ lenses to accommodate a $50 slide holder, no?

The slides are indeed very contrasty. I'm bringing the shadows up a bit in Capture One as I process the RAW files, but doing that beyond a certain point just makes them ugly.

None of the slides are super-sharp. Under a 30x loupe, the grain is sharp, but all the images have some motion blur or misfocus. No wonder, we're talking ASA 10 film here. That's 1/80 at f/5.6 of 1/160 at f/4 in bright sunshine, and it just gets slower from there.

Yup, yup. I have a few late 30s-early 40s family Kodachromes. None are really sharp, even the better ones. I compared a 4000 dpi film scan to a 12 MP 5D shot with the bellows and slide copier attachment. There was no meaningful difference.

OTOH, back when my then flat bed scanner died, I looked around and ended up with a Canon 9950F, which will scan 12 slides at once. There are two advantages to that over the camera route. It's a lot less fuss; just drop the slides in the holder, and let the scanner do its thing. AND - dust removal. This didn't work very well with KRs until lately. But now both VueScan ans SilverFast have figured out how to make it work pretty well. I HATE spotting! Nothing awful in these of yours, especially as memories, not serious images, but lots of little black specks.

BTW, the ancient Polaroid dust removal software will nicely clean up those skies, if you are willing to use masks to separate detail areas from skies, etc. Here's an example using a slide from Brian's youth. <http://www.moosemystic.net/Gallery/Others/BSwale/Home2_dipton-srp15-1200px.htm>

I'm thinking that the 28/2.8 OM lens may be good enough. It does not quite resolve the film grain, although I can still focus the camera on the grain texture at 14x electronic magnification. But what's the point of resolving the grain if the highest resolution of the image is lower than that? The images I'm getting looks to me as good as I see under the loupe.

A lot of older film images just don't have much detail. And it's not just motion blur; many of the lenses weren't all that good, either. I have a bunch of my dad's 6x7 negs fro a Kodak folder, which adds the fun of film/lens misalignment. There's just no point scanning them at more than 300 dpi, 'cause there's just no more detail there.

If I find a slide that really warrants it, I can always get out the Canon FS-4000 film scanner. It can do a dual pass scan to open up the shadows. But for most of the work, this is *so* much faster and easier.

Such reverse experiences! My FS4000 is sitting right next to the computer and hooked up all the time. The old story was that the USB was impossibly slow, but it was poor early hardware implementations of USB 2.0. With the USB on this computer, USB seems to be as fast as the scanner data stream, and thus as the SCSI connection I used to use. Turn it on, and it's ready to go in a few seconds.

So if I need to scan a few slides, it's much quicker and easier to toss them in the scanner four at a time and let it and VueScan do their thing while I do other things.

Alternate Universe Moose

--
What if the Hokey Pokey *IS* what it's all about?

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