UKH

I know there are regular threads about scanning old slides, but in experimental mode I tried photographing a few today - I did it outside in full sunshine, holding the slides in front of an illuminated sheet of white papers and using the camera's 'close-up' mode. I thought the results and the system might be of interest. A basic improvement would be to clean the slides before I started, the sun highlights the dust!

Chris

Those have come out surprisingly well.

They have done very well. Have you done much photoshopping or is this raw?

Very impressed. I'm a fan of low-tech.

I have used Photoshop to straighten them and trim the edges, the originals only fill about half the frame - I may experiment with using the zoom end of the lens in but I will probably need someone else to hold the slides,

Chris

There actually used to be a slide adapter you could screw on the filter threads of a close focus macro lens (might have required some extenders in between).

But those do indeed look really good.

Astonishingly good - the flat bed scanner I was using until it blew a tube in the backlight (I think) would not have done so well. And nor would the Nikon Coolscan I used at the turn of the century - it was so slow that you could die of boredom. 

I remember long evenings with the Coolscan for work - a film took about 90 minutes and I suspect here, higher pixel count and much wider dynamic range and perhaps matrix metering are all having good effects and a better output.

Hi

What camera and lens? What was the set up - distance from lens to slide?  

I have a pile of slides going back to the late 70s that I'd like to digitise at some point. I quite liek the idea of a "reverse" slide projector.   

Thanks

I scan slides by using a 100mm macro lens, a Canon DSLR and a lightbox with a vertical camera mounting. Way faster than a slide scanner and sufficiently good quality.

Nikon used to make a slide copier (Slide copyer ES-1) that looked appealing although the number of compatible lenses was small from memory.

Sony RX10 - the lens is 24-600. I have it at 24mm and the slides maybe 5cm from the front of the lens.

Chris

Those look really good! Just so I understand the set up,  did you use the reflected sunlight off the paper to act like a light-box, back-lighting the slides, or am I misunderstanding the technique?

Yes, sun shining on a piece of A4 and the slide held in-front of it at an angle - quite a bit of fiddling to get everything right, but still quicker than scanning. I suspect the bright sunlight is the key,

Chris

Thanks for clarifying. I recently came across a load of old family slides I'd like to digitize and this sounds like a good way to do so efficiently. I might set up a basic cardboard jig to hold the slides in place to speed up the process.

That is really impressive. Did you have some sort of slot to put the slides in. Autofocus?

Nikon make the ES-2 film copy adapter. It's designed to work with a couple of their macro lenses, but with the help of extension rings and adapters it can be made to work with other macro lenses.

The method I use at the moment is to place the negative or slide on a light box. If you do not have a light box, you can get a light panel app for a phone/tablet. Camera on a tripod, and I use a bullseye spirit level to get the camera back and the film parallel. Holding the film flat is the difficult bit.

Lomography make a frame called a DigitaLIZA, intended for scanning, which can be used to hold the film flat. There are other frame designs, too; the Pixl-latr looks good: https://www.pixl-latr.com/

Hand-held, auto-focus, and a bit of fiddling. The unedited shot + final versions below.

Chris

Just to get a digital record of several hundred slides, some of which were discoloured, I photographed them on the screen as they were running through the projector. Took about 5 seconds per shot. Not perfect but I've not looked at them for 15 years.