Picture(s) of the day....

[Gibbo2286]

Serving in the desert in Egypt was fun, you had to be sure to give your clothing and boots a good shake before dressing to be sure you hadn't picked up a scorpion.

[Richard_C]

Can you recommend a reasonably priced scanner Jim? That is if I have any transparencies left after the fire!

Peter

I copied over 3500 slides using my Pentax Kx, an old manual 50mm M lens, an extension tube, a black tube made from a juice bottle lined with card and a slide holder made from plywood and hair clips plus a light diffuser made from a tupperware box.. Camera was tethered to a laptop, put slide in, press space bar, next please .. captured a bit of the mount as well.

I put them all through photo editing with shortcuts set up for crop, rotate and auto levels. I reckoned I could copy 250 an hour and edit 250 an hour. A big project but did it over a few weeks in winter and far better than having thousands of slides that I would never look at again. Quality plenty good enough for on screen viewing so sometimes have them scrolling through on the TV when I'm listening to the radio. Oooh look, that Buick we hired in '88 and drove to Yosemite....

The scanners available at the time would have taken a lot longer but I suspect they are faster and better now.

If I find the odd slide in a drawer now I put it in a peg a few inches in front of my computer monitor with a blank page on screen and photograph it with my mobile phone. Phone processing is so good these days you get decent colour and contrast. Good enough for preserving memories of places and people.

[Richard_C]

Anyway, my picture of the day for today. Been clearing cupboards out, found a box with a Chevrolet Impala, a Rover 2000 and my battered Citroen Safari in it. Corgi, 1960s, Split tailgate like the real one, cunning wheel under the bottom that folded the rear seats down, and (how quaint) made in Great Britain. So as it FCF, not ACF or BCF, here's the Citroen

[myglaren]

Serving in the desert in Egypt was fun, you had to be sure to give your clothing and boots a good shake before dressing to be sure you hadn't picked up a scorpion.

1975 Jungle school Malaya. We’d just done live firing jungle lanes and we were lined up for the declaration to our platoon commander. The drill was cock your weapon and hold back the working parts, open both ammo pouches and hold the lids open by hooking them under your elbows. The PC would come along, stick his hands in the pouches and then check the rifle.

So the boss made his way along the line, when he got to me - for reasons unknown to both of us - before he stuck his hands in the pouches he looked inside and stepped smartly back and said “nice try”. I looked at him but said nothing, not having a clue what he meant. He then said “there’s a f*cking scorpion in your pouch!”

I think he realised by the speed at which I chucked my rifle and dropped my webbing that I had no idea it was there”

[Peter.N.]

Thanks for the info Richard

I copied most of those I needed a few years ago, I set up the projector and displayed them on the dining room wall, I the carefully set up my camera on a tripod as close to the projector as I could get and they all came out very well, I downloaded them to my computer and they all dissapeared! Never found them again.

Peter

[CitroJim]

I copied over 3500 slides using my Pentax Kx, an old manual 50mm M lens, an extension tube, a black tube made from a juice bottle lined with card and a slide holder made from plywood and hair clips plus a light diffuser made from a tupperware box.. Camera was tethered to a laptop, put slide in, press space bar, next please .. captured a bit of the mount as well.

That's excellent Richard! A superb bit of improvision - love it A lot of people use that very method for scanning negatives although using a macro lens and a proper light box... Using a Tupperware box for that is inspirational

The scanners available at the time would have taken a lot longer but I suspect they are faster and better now.

No, they are still very slow although the quality is excellent. To scan a 24 exposure film on my Plustek OpticFilm takes around half an hour. For me, that's tolerable. The good thing is that once they've been through the scanner and the very competent VueScan software, very little post-processing is then needed.

[Richard_C]

although using a macro lens

A 50mm prime and an extension tube gets you to 1:1, good enough for this job.

While thinking about scanning, we had a lot of prints, many from clearing out my wife's parents' house. Flat bed scanners are pretty slow to use and to scan so we invested a fair bit - I think about £500 - in an Epson FastFoto 660 scanner. You put the prints into the feeder in batches of 50 (or more) and it spits them out at the bottom at about 1 per second. Really clever auto processing and it does a low quality scan of the back of the photo if there is any writing on it so you get filename xxx and xxxb if there is a note like "aunty Veras wedding".. It let's you set up a directory for each batch if you want and gives you meaningful sequential file names so its all done in one pass. e.g. Summer Italy 1974 xx1, xx2 etc. Having done it all we gave a usb copy stick to each of her siblings and a cousin. I've started the process of doing all my old prints, reckoning that one day I'll end up living in a much smaller space so digital copies will be the only way. I mention it because its one fo the few piece of kit/sotware that I've found really impressive and well though out. It does one job and does it very well.

[PaulC5]

What size files do you end up with the Fastfoto, we have a lot of paper prints that would be better if digital but would need to store them somewhere.

[Richard_C]

You can make choices in the software. That choice depends on what you want them for. In my case the prints were not that good to begin with, just sent off to Boots or whoever for processing, and it was snapshot territory rather than high quality (I used Kodachrome 64 slide film for that) so it was just to remember people and trips. 300 dpi is plenty good enough for showing on screen so that's what I chose, each file is about 400 Kb. So - a 1 Gb usb flash drive stick will hold > 2000, and a decent known brand 64 Gb stick which would hold more than you will ever have time to see is only £10. More than enough. If you do choose that route get 2 and have 2 copies in case one gets corrupted or lost. I have all my pictures and important data on my hard drive, in MS Onedrive ("the sky") , and on either a USB stick or NAS drive. The chance of losing all 3 is very low indeed.

Attached is one of father in law's pictures from a trip with us in 1993. This is a car forum after all, and when my wife asked if we could take her parents to the USA I said yes, but I get to pick the hire car Denver, deserts, canyons, mountains, we all enjoyed it. None of us are large people so a Lincoln Town Car gave us plenty of elbow room ...

Not a great picture, but hey what a great car for huge distances.

[Steve Walsh]

This is my picture of the day... 2 out of 4 Glow Plugs snapped... Managed to remove with an extractor kit.. Made my day

[CitroJim]

Managed to remove with an extractor kit.. Made my day

That would have made my day too Steve

[Steve Walsh]

Not sure if it was Determination or Desperation.

[mickthemaverick]

Not sure if it was Determination or Desperation.

The main thing is it wasn't disintegration!

[Hell Razor5543]

I had to replace my Fujifilm digital camera recently (due to a few niggling issues), and I got a second hand Nikon L830 for £30. It has one issue (in that the internal battery has failed, so won't retain the time/date), but it is quite a decent spec. Just an hour or so ago I spotted a parafoil glider in the distance, so I took a few photos. I think they turned out well, considering the distance;

[CitroJim]

That camera has an incredible optical zoom range James... It did a good job there with the paraglider

I fell in love with a Nikon yesterday... The Z Fc A high-end digital that looks and drives just like a traditional film SLR.