Basket of Kittens
This is part of my Christmas holiday’s experimenting with duplicating old slides. I chose the images for the post to please Oneowner‘s Ken Bello who seems to have a thing about this particular subject, and even if he does not like them, perhaps his cat Emo will. And, Melinda, feel free to photoshop one of these into your cliché-ridden post of a few weeks ago.
This is a second day in a row where being tired is influencing what I put up. These images I had processed and they were sitting around, more easily used than what I might otherwise post.
The experiment involved trying to copy slides with the attachment that came with my new-old bellows unit, officially known as the Canon Slide Duplicator. I thought that once set up it might be a fast way to deal with slide duplication as taking a picture is faster than a long slow scan. I used the first box of slides I could find, one that has been out and about for a variety of uses many times. The images in it are from 1977, Kodachrome – probably Kodachrome 64 as that is what I mostly shot. The slides are extremely dusty due to a variety of storage conditions over the years. These kitten’s names are forgotten to me, though if I had to guess I would say they might be Tarquin and Linnea, at least for one of them. The slides were processed in June of 1977, which is a bit mysterious to me since I was working in north and central British Columbia for four months that year and not home at all. Probably I took them in April or May before departure and once I had finished the roll, sent if off for processing with my home address for the return. So, I would not have seen these images for about 5 months after taking them. Those long waits for results really are a thing of the past.
I was not thrilled with the results – for a number of reasons.
- The adapter for my EOS mount camera onto the FD mount bellows unit is not properly aligned. This does not matter for macro shots, but for this application it means that the slide is off-angle to the sensor (see first picture) and requires less magnification followed by cropping and straightening thus reducing resolution a bit. I can get another adapter if I find a way to make this work.
- Annoyingly easy to get the slide into the adaptor the wrong way around – both back to front and sideways (see first picture for this example too).
- Getting good colour reproduction was very difficult.
- Focussing is tricky, even in a magnified live view mode. Especially with slides that are not as sharp as they could be in the first place.
- No automatic dust removal software as on scanners (I had a go at the very worst of it, but there is a lot more to go, and this was not the worst of the ones I tried by any means).
One of the store operators where I bought the Canon FD macro lens advised that I might find an HDR treatment would work better for duplicating since slides have a greater dynamic range than digital sensors. So that is what I did. Not totally convinced it is necessary, but whatever the case, the images that I took, including any of the brackets at 1.0 E.V., require a lot of tweaking to get them closer to what the slide looks like. Seems like a lot of work and thus I have not embarked on a big copying binge. Or any at all. Still, it shows some promise providing I can find a good way to clean the slides first, get an adapter that is properly aligned, establish a good lighting source that I set as a custom white balance, and don’t mind a bit of post processing. Way cheaper than a good scanner, or commercial scanning, though perhaps not quite such a good product.
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Canon 5Dii, Canon FD 50mm f3.5 Macro, Canon FL Bellows, Canon Slide Duplicator, ISO100. Original photographs with Pentax Spotmatic 1000, and most likely a SMC Takumar 50mm f1.8 or f1.4, though it could be a 35mm f3.5 lens.
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burnt embers 
What an incredible amount of work to create these, I really appreciate that, Ehpem! I think they turned out rather well, if you ask me. Knowing that they come from an original slide, that context really helps the viewer appreciate what we are seeing here. Not to mention.. cute durned kitties!
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Thank you Toad. They are cute aren’t they? I suspect that scanning them is pretty much the same amount of time, though I would need to run some tests to see. Kind of fun though to explore some old slides.
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Sounds like a daunting task…and I have to say that I really like that first image!! 😀
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Thanks David.I like it too, and I like the way the framing came out even though it is the result of mistakes and thus that is why I left it alone.
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Even if you aren’t pleased, that second image of kittens at play is too cute for words.
Too. Cute. For. Words.
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Hi Ryan – they are very cute. Must be why I picked up the photo. I expect the first one was taken just a few minutes after the second. Wore themselves out.
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“A basket of kittens is a bushel of trouble” old Shropshire proverb.
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Hi Valerie, it sounds like they knew exactly what they were talking about in Shropshire. I can’t even imagine a bushel of kittens – that could bring a city to a halt I suspect.
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Of course, Emo and I are very pleased that you choose these to start your project. I have thousands of slides, mostly in archival pages. There aren’t a lot I would want to transfer since a lot of my early stuff is junk. But now that I have the D600 I am trying to use the slide duplicator from the 1980’s that fits on the body in place of the lens. Early experiments are promising but I wish the optics in the duplicator were better. For dust I find a very soft camel hair brush and canned air to do a reasonable job and then the clone tool in LR4 to touch up.
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Hi Ken – thanks for the info. I too have a lot of junk, or just documentary snapshot type stuff. It will be interesting so see how some of yours work out if you ever let them see the light of day. I am not giving up on this, yet. But it is a lot more involved that I thought it would be. At least the optics for my setup are good, if only they were straight!
I am glad Emo approves. My cat does too, especially as these ones are long dead and thus no competition for Her.
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I have boxes and boxes of slides, and after reading your post, I am almost positive I am not even going to attempt digital versions of them. Instead, I will let them become quaint relics for the grandkids to enjoy. Or whatever.
Also, I can hardly wait to get those kitties onto the cliché bench!
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Its a tough choice. If money were no object, I would be having them done commercially – at least a selection. If I shot colour, it was slides. I have almost no colour negatives until mid 80’s when we moved away and needed prints of the kids to send to family, and that kind of thing. For work I always shot b&w to include in reports since we did not do colour reports, and slides for lectures. I think the negatives would be easier to deal with – they have a lot less dust and once a strip is in the holder it can be pulled through frame by frame. But, to reverse a negative in Lightroom (I don’t have photoshop) I have to use a workaround as there are no presets for that, so it is a bit of a nuisance at the moment.
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It will be interesting to see how you fit them onto the bench – it’s not the best view to work with.
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I recall reading about Bellows and slide copying units round about the time you shot these images or possibly even earlier. Someone I knew did actually own a setup and copied a few slides for me but they were harsh and over-contrasty. I now have a Nikon Coolscan and have copied a few slides using that. Not easy. Contrast remains a big problem, even with the built-in clever technology to eliminate dust there is still bags of it, and the colours are hard to get true. It’s a task that requires me to spend hours of time perfecting a preset for one type of film but I really don’t relish the task. The easy option is to send them away to a specialist scanner – but I guess that would come with a horrendous price tag. Good luck with this project.
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HI Andy. I think however one does this kind of project the price is pretty horrendous. I am short on time, so if it takes lots of time that is bad. And I am short on funds. The idea of using gear that cost me 45$ (bellows, duplicater and adapter) and which I bought for another purpose anyway appeals to the financial side, but the time that it appears to take…. Still, I might find that I can develop some useful presets in both photomatix and lightroom and process batches of slides at once. Nearly all of mine are Kodachrome. I have a few rolls of fujichrome and quite a few of ecktachrome, but the vast majority are K64, So, presets might be workable. When I have another block of time I might give it another try. One thing is clear, once things are set up, dupliction involves dropping the slide in the holder and taking a picture – longer exposures usually since good depth of field is desirable to deal with film distortion. So, it is potentially much quicker (~1 minute per slide?) than most scanners. Cleaning the slide has to be done with any method, and post-processing is also involved.
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Good luck with the job of getting them all done. Sounds onerous. I recently bought an old slide projector on ebay for 99 cents and had a binge of looking at family slides – not too many left due to a burglary where boxes of them were nicked – why???. I thought about getting a machine to transfer them all to the computer but then thought I’d probably never look at them after that. Our slide night was great fun and another one is coming up, I hope.
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Hi Katherine – what an amazing thing for people to steal. Probably did not know what they were taking? I doubt that I am going to do too many of these. It might be more interesting with b&w negatives. Slides were meant to be looked at on a screen, and I still have one, and a projector. However, I do have some work related slides it would be nice to have digital versions of. I just can’t see spending a lot of time doing this.
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