Posts by David Hood
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From Dunedin Botanic Gardens
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Capture: Labour Weekend: Town or Country?, in reply to Leigh Russell,
The view is out over the Christchurch estuary and Pegasus Bay.
That is a lovely baroque cloudscape
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Capture: Labour Weekend: Town or Country?, in reply to Hebe,
What are you you using? Any tips?
What I happen to be using is an oldish (2005) Epsom Perfection 4870 (but that is only really because I happen to have access to it). It is a flatbed scanner with a light you can put on in the lid, so you can scan transparencies.
Because it has a little rack for putting eight slides in at a time, I am skipping the preview scans (since the slide is in the same place each time) as a time saver. Because of the number of slides I am not bothering to adjust the scanned area for portrait or landscape of the picture, I am just scanning in the square area of (more or less) the whole slide. It is a relatively easy job to write a computer script that crops the black frame of the slide at a later point in time (I've written a number of scripts like this in the past for different jobs).
I do know of custom slide scanning machines, but haven't used one so can't speak to them. Though I have heard from people whose opinion I trust that they can be a bit temperamental with different kind of frames so you often need to do a bit of bodging to get cardboard frames through a slide scanner optimised for plastic framed slides. I've got cardboard framed slides, several different kinds of plastic framed slides, so metal framed slides, and some that are actually just two bits of glass taped together.
I am scanning at 1200 dpi, as good enough for onscreen viewing, and saving them as a tiff (since jpg is lossy compression I wouldn't use it by preference for a job like this). However, I am putting aside all the important slides (mainly the family history ones) with the intention of doing a second pass of scanning these again at 3600 dpi (which is towards the upper end of the scanners abilities).
If I have got one really major tip, it is to get into the scanner settings if you can and turn of all correction. My reason for saying this that the scanners built in adjustments are intended to be good general purpose ones, but are not necessarily the absolutely best adjustments for a particular slide. Computer programs have gotten a lot better over time at fixing up pictures, and I expect that to improve. So I would rather be fixing up by hand a particular image from the original rather than one that has had (for example) automatically had a slight general blurring applied by the scanner to small dots of different colour to their surroundings to get rid of dust specks. I trust my skills in this more than the scanner's, and expect the tools to do this to get better and easier to use over time.
Because I don't have a lot of contextual information, I am scanning the slides into folders named with any identifying comments from the slide box (for those that were in boxes). Later on, I really mean to get around to looking at options for easily applying keywords to the picture metadata so that they become part of the picture file.
About the only other thing I can think of to do with scanning (rather than for example the techniques for fixing up the picture files) as I write this (having scanned another 32 slides) is to make sure the scanner stays clean. I am doing a quick wipe with a soft cloth now and then to remove the transfer dust etc from all the slides being put on and taken off. -
It is a lovely spring day in Dunedin today.
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Capture: Labour Weekend: Town or Country?, in reply to Leigh Russell,
Hi David, that image is a memorable one! I’m guessing it may have been taken somewhere in Central Otago?
Yes, definitely Central, but beyond that I'm not entirely sure. I scanned in about 400 slides this week (with many more to go) and many of them were a bit "that's a lovely landscape picture, but I have no context for when or where".
My impression is that the colour can be a little uneven, but it seems to depend on the film or development process. I am pretty confident with the computer techniques for restoring the colour, so for the moment just concentrating of getting them all scanned in as 1200 dpi tiffs (I will then fix them up individually as needed). In fact, the earlier hoar frost photo was while I was still experimenting with the scanner settings. Here is one from when I repeated the scans, not having the scanner correct anything then adjusting things afterwards myself.
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Capture: Labour Weekend: Town or Country?, in reply to Leigh Russell,
I haven’t been able to find the name of them from my usual aquatic searching site, the excellent Otago University and NZ Marine Studies Aquarium Guide but not all of the entries include photographs.
To be honest, there has been a little bit of a data entry botch on this one in the Aquarium guide, it is listed with the Scientific name of Keao and the Maori name of Pyura Pachydermatina. But they are doing some data entry tidying up of the contents at the moment, so I would expect it will be corrected fairly soon.
The guide is a series of static web pages generated from information held in a database, because back in the day it was thought handy to be able to make completely local copies on CD for schools (ie back in the days before reliable broadband). I know this because I did the technical setup of the database, and by coincidence was doing data conversion work involving it this evening.
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I did indeed, and have been showing it off to all and sundry.
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Capture: BOTY Potty., in reply to Joe Wylie,
A kind of moire pattern
Could be. the reason I thumb (or for that matter palm) is that it is only across part of the picture.
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One of my father's slides (after scanning, I suspect there was a thumb print on the slide)
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This weekend, I have been scanning in old photo slides of my parents. This is one of my late father's slides from a box labelled "Hoar Frost" that seems to have been developed in July of 1994
