Here!
The lilacs are in bloom and the scent is flowing through the whole neighborhood. Lilacs are very popular here and it seems there are several on every block. And the flowering trees are putting on quite a show. Trees of solid white, pink, red. Very nice.
In other news, my Flickr obsession drove me to buy a better scanner. One that will scan slides and negs with good quality. Brought it home Tuesday night and Oh! My! Lord! It was just too cool. You see, when I went to study abroad, I had been working at a photo shop the summer before. So I bought 100 feet of Ektachrome 60 film and rolled something like 35 rolls of slide film to take with. I also took another 35 rolls in print film BTW. So I got home and processed them. I held a little slide show and put my family to sleep. But since it was wicked expensive to create prints, the slides have sat in a nice little storage box. I haven't looked at them in over a decade.
So the other night I took this cool slide viewer that looked like I had never been taken out of the box and started pumping in slides. WOW! I was blown away just seeing all these images that I had not remembered seeing. And some of them are pretty damn good if I say so myself. Plus, the scanner itself worked great! It didn't crash my computer and it didn't take long to scan them. It also has a bunch of bells and whistles that should cut down or eliminate processing time after scanning. I cannot express how anxious I am to recapture, print, and display these images. But that's not all, I also have a binder of all my negatives from over the years to go through. It's buried somewhere in storage, but it should not take long to find. The only difficulty is much of the slides and negs have a healthy layer of dust on them. But I don't care! This is just sooo cool!
With that, the blog will have a small programming change. I will have two written posts and two photos posted a week. As opposed to the previous three written posts and one photo routine. It's a bit crazy to be that organized with what should be a free flowing media, but that's the way I like it. Also I prefer to post my really good photos here before posting them on Flickr. So that's why I want to step up the frequency of posted photos. So with that, watch for my first scanned slide to come up Tuesday. It should be fun since I was more passionate about photography back then and had more time to dedicate to it.
4 comments:
My dad is looking for a good slide scanner that can scan in batches. Does your scanner have that capability? He has literally THOUSANDS of slides. I don't need a price, but I just wonder if your scanner was expensive? Moreso than a regular scanner, in other words? Thanks!
The scanner we had before was only 1200dpi and the images were very poor. You couldn't even make out faces. The salesman at the photo store said that 2400dpi was the bare minimum, with 3600dpi recommended. I didn't want to take any chances so I went with 4800dpi. The price difference between the two wasn't that much. The price difference seemed to be between those that could scan slides and negs and those that couldn't.
As far as scanning slides in bulk. The one that we got scans four at a time and cost about twice as much as a standard scanner. I was willing to pay the extra cost to finally print my slides. I would say that it took about a minute a slide including loading and unloading the slides. That doesn't include time cleaning the flatbed surface or if the slides have dust on them.
For faster scanning, the store had others that were for slides and negs only for about a grand. I have seen others online for two grand that have the capacity to just load a stack of them and walk away. That's what my research turned up.
Very helpful! Thanks very much!
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