{"id":2455,"date":"2012-02-28T09:39:09","date_gmt":"2012-02-28T09:39:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.pmstudios.co.uk\/blog\/?p=2455"},"modified":"2012-02-28T09:42:28","modified_gmt":"2012-02-28T09:42:28","slug":"digitising-old-instamatic-colour-slides","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.pmstudios.co.uk\/blog\/?p=2455","title":{"rendered":"Digitising old Instamatic Colour Slides"},"content":{"rendered":"

When I was a young teenager I used an Instamatic camera for my snapshots. I used colour slide film because it was the cheapest way of getting a photograph at that time. I now have boxes of slides, taken with different cameras, slowly decaying away. Many have mould marks on them.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>A few years ago I made an initial attempt to scan these in to my computer and, although this worked OK for a reasonably exposed photo, the scanning process seemed to enhance the marks made by the mould – as you can see there are many marks on this photo to the right.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>However, I discovered that I could get a better image by using my digital camera with a macro lens. Using this has given the image on the left which, I am sure, you will agree is a lot cleaner.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Another problem was with colour casts – this could vary from red:<\/p>\n

\"red<\/a>(yes, that is me in the 6th form at school many years ago…) to violet:<\/p>\n

\"violet<\/a>\"\"<\/a>One of the biggest problems though was poor exposure. The camera was a simple fixed focus, fixed exposure, device. So, many images were quite dark or too light. A typical photo, as taken by my setup (described below), was like this on the right. Even then the camera copying this has made some exposure adjustments. With a bit of editing I managed to get this as a final image:<\/p>\n

\"edited<\/a>A bit of an improvement on the original. At least I now have some images to reminisce over with my friends.<\/p>\n

The setup:<\/strong><\/p>\n

Years ago I bought a slide duplicator for my film camera. Although this worked OK, I was never satisfied with the quality of the photos (many of the originals were taken with better cameras). Now that I have a cropped format sensor on my digital camera, this duplicator was no longer usable – it cropped half of the image out. So I took the thing to bits so that I could utilise the slide (and film) carrier, made a barrel to connect this with my macro lens and mounted the setup on a piece of wood as shown below:<\/p>\n

\"slide<\/a>Black cardboard, black foamcore, black foam sheet, Sugru, Blu Tack… To provide the light I used a dedicated flashgun on an extension lead. I used the camera’s auto exposure setting which gave a reasonable level of exposure compensation.<\/p>\n

Overall, I am quite satisfied with the results. I have worked through all the Instamatic slides, those taken with a Zenith B (remember those? Russian made and built like a tank!) and I am currently processing those taken with an Olympus 35ECR compact camera – this I took in my overland trip through Africa in the early 1970s.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When I was a young teenager I used an Instamatic camera for my snapshots. I used colour slide film because it was the cheapest way of getting a photograph at that time. I now have boxes of slides, taken with different cameras, slowly decaying away. Many have mould marks on them. A few years ago … Continue reading “Digitising old Instamatic Colour Slides”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2455","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technical"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pmstudios.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2455","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pmstudios.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pmstudios.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pmstudios.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pmstudios.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2455"}],"version-history":[{"count":23,"href":"https:\/\/www.pmstudios.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2455\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2485,"href":"https:\/\/www.pmstudios.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2455\/revisions\/2485"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pmstudios.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2455"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pmstudios.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2455"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pmstudios.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2455"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}