What to do with those old colour slides?

I have literally thousands of colour slides – probably 8,000-9,000 of them, from times which range from when my father bought his little Voigtlander Vito B in about 1955 until I took my last colour transparencies in the 1990s.

The question is what to do with them all in the time poor digital age.  How often would one get out the projector and set up the screen, manually load the slides into the projector’s magazine, and settle in for a slide evening?  Answer: effectively never.

Clearly the answer is to harness the technologies of the digital age and digitise the lot.  To that end, in about 2001 I purchased a transparency adapter for my HP flatbed scanner, and produced some acceptable digital photos from some of my favourite slides.  I was pretty happy with this at the time, but it is a process that has couple of downsides It is very labour intensive, and as the scanner is focusing through the screen onto a transparency that is sitting above the glass, its focus will tend to be thrown off somewhat by backscatter from the surface of the glass.  Acceptable resolution is achievable but high resolution is not, and the process struggles to produce a file that will allow a print larger than 15cm x 10 cm.

Also, good old Hewlett Packard decided not to release drivers for that particular scanner for operating systems post Windows XP.  I found some third party software that would allow me to continue to use the scanner but it will only scan at a resolution of 1200 x 1200 dpi, and while it offers a range of post-scan processing options it does not permit the simple option of scanning the slide as is and not mucking about with it.

So after a bit of homework on the I web imported from the United States a specialised slide scanner, a Pacific Image Electronics PowerSlide 5000, which as its name suggests scans at a magnificent 5000 x 5000 dpi. This appears to be a clone of a German original made by Braun; I could not find on the web any sign of an Australian retailer for either the Braun machine or the US equivalent.

The machine comes bundled with Adobe Photoshop Elements 8.0, and there are options which enable files to be sent to that software for processing, but as I have a copy of Photoshop CS3 I prefer to take the scans as JPEG files exactly as they come off the scanner, and make any tweaks I want to as a separate step.  Any slide with the right exposure will be acceptable without further processing, but the wonderful thing about digital technology is that those very important under- or over-exposed slides of family occasions or long departed friends can be very considerably enhanced and seen as intended.

The slides are fed into the scanner from a standard slide magazine which holds fifty slides.  They can be scanned at any resolution up to 5000 dpi, to either TIFF or JPEG files, using 8-bit or 16-bit colour, with two or three quality options.  After a bit of experimentation I am systematically scanning the whole collection at highest quality in 16-bit colour at full resolution.  This means I am not having to make decisions about which treatment to apply to which slides, and I also have the maximum opportunity subsequently to crop a slide heavily and still have a good quality photo of the reduced field of view, or a detail of the photo.

This approach is not for the faint hearted because it is very heavy on storage; such high quality scans produce files in the range 13-15MB, which means that you are looking at about 500MB to scan one 36-exposure roll of film. 

Scanning at this quality is a pretty slow process – it takes about 4-5 minutes per slide, but as they feed automatically into the scanner it is possible to load up a batch and then go and do something else – as long as that something else is not a process on your computer that requires more than a modicum of RAM, as the process is pretty heavy on memory.

There is a downside to everything of course, and the downside of scanning at such high resolution is that your scans come up with a magnificent high resolution image of every biological colony that has made a home for itself on your slide collection over the course of half a century.  That is where Photoshop CS3’s spot healing tool comes in – it really does a great job of cleaning scratches, smears and the spots of bio-debris from the image.

This of course is only half the story – after putting all this effort in you have gone from having boxes of slides that you never get around to looking at to having hundreds of Gigabytes of files on a hard drive somewhere.

I have two solutions for this, to get me to the point where I actually see some of these precious images.   The first is that I keep as many of them as I can in a master folder on the hard drive of the laptop which I carry backwards and forwards between home and the office.  I point the screensaver to that master folder, so that every time the screensaver cuts in I get a random display of all of the photos in the folder.  As I use an external monitor at both locations, I get to see a selection of my slides in a high quality format quite regularly.

The second (more systematic viewing) solution is that I recently purchased an Apple TV unit for about $139. This plugs into my TV via an HDMI cable, so I can view any chosen subfolder of the master folder simply by firing up iTunes and transmitting the images to the high definition TV screen over the home wi-fi system.  Works a treat.

Expect more pictures on Aussie Observer.

Shadows of Christmases past

In Australia Christmas falls in the period when schools and universities are on their long summer holidays. Its arrival turns the mind back to the Christmases of youth, which in my case from the age of four to the age of 21 involved spending three glorious weeks from ten days before Christmas to a few days after New Year in Port Macquarie, specifically on Flynn’s Beach, which at that time of the year seemed to be packed with people from Armidale and Tamworth.

After the first couple of years we secured a permanent booking in the Beach Park Holiday Cabins, seen here from Tully’s Lookout and from within the grounds:

This collection of ten modest fibro cabins represented the asset and livelihood of a man named Leslie Holmes, who had been demobilised from the British Army in India on Indian independence in 1947 and who had chosen to emigrate to Australia, and invested his savings in this piece of real estate. Leslie was a hard-working, meticulous man who kept his cabins in tip top order and who was continually improving them by the labour of his own hand during the quiet winter season. He and his wife Nell had one son, of precisely my age, and having permanent company to surf with added a great deal to those holidays.  There were others of about my age who were regulars, and it was great fun.

All we had to do to get to the beach in the morning was cross the road, walk down the Tuppeny Road (so called because it had been paid for by means of a toll of that amount), which emerged from the beachfront right opposite the cabins, and we were on the beach, where we could body-surf from the back of the break, hoping for the occasional days when waves would be breaking over the bombora about 400 metres offshore (the clubhouse looked rather small and far away from out there), sunbake until our skin was chocolate brown (we were not particularly skin-cancer aware in those days, the blacker we were the better), and enjoy occasional distractions like practice rescues with the reel and line which was the standard equipment in those days, the real rescues which occurred occasionally, the pods of dolphins cavorting in the waves which were a fairly frequent occurrence, the occasional shark bell, and surf carnivals, the highlight of which was always the surf-boat races, especially when the surf was up.

 

 

 

 

The pictures are scans of fifty-year old 35 mm transparencies taken with my father’s Voigtländer Vito B camera, purchased in about 1955.

In praise of Rotties

Rottweillers sometimes come in for a bad press. As someone who lived with one for ten years I can say that any reputation they might have in the tabloid press for being savage or unreliable is thoroughly undeserved. A more placid and even tempered dog it would be hard to find.

The origin of the breed goes back to Roman times; they are largely derived from, and similar in appearance to, a kind of bristle-coated dog the Romans used primarily for herding. As such, it is one of the oldest of herding breeds.

In the absence of refrigeration and suitable food preservation techniques, when in AD 74 they invaded Germany the Romans were obliged to feed the legions with meat on the hoof, and so they brought their droving dogs with them on the long route over the Alps via the St. Gothard Pass, and into the Württemburg region. The breed became established, with admixture from mastiff-like dogs from England and the Netherlands, particularly around the market town now known as Rottweil, so named because when in about AD 700 the locals constructed a church on the site of an old Roman villa, they turned up some red tiles (rote Wile) in the course of the excavation.

They have exceptional ability as droving and stock protection dogs, but from the 19^th century when railways became the main means of moving livestock their numbers declined, and they were mainly used as draught animals undertaking deliveries for small farms. Interest in the breed revived in the lead up to the First World War, when they were used as police dogs.

Two Rottweiler clubs with different objectives were established in Germany in 1907; they subsequently amalgamated. In 1935 the breed was officially recognised by the American Kennel Club, and by the 1990s it had become the number one breed being registered with that Club.

Rottweilers are very powerful dogs with well-developed herding and guarding instincts. As working dogs they are very intelligent, trainable, obedient, and eager to work (gain approval). As dogs that are bred to work around animals they are very calm and self confident, and hence very reliable with children. Any potentially dangerous behaviour is attributable to irresponsible ownership, abuse, neglect or lack of training. As with any powerful breed, it is important that they be cared for, treated well and trained sufficiently to respond reliably to voice commands at all times.

Jacq the Dog entered our lives as a small furry slug with legs so short that he could climb the stairs in our house only with difficulty. By the time he was twelve months old he weighed in at 68kg (don’t take any notice of literature that tells you that a typical male weighs 50kg, it isn’t so). I calculated that during the course of his first year his body weight increased by 150 grams per day.

Unfortunately the breed is not a long lived one and Jacq died at just a few months over ten years old.

And here are a few photos of Jacq the Dog:

Tai Textiles from Lao-Viet Border

At Behruz Studio, 1509 Malvern Road (Glen Iris Vic 3146) there is an interesting display of textiles of the Tai people of Nghê An Province, in the northern part of Vietnam bordering Laos. All of the items on display belong to Melbourne collector Russell Howard, who has provided informative labeling for the items and a few photographs from his travels.

The items are on show until 26 June. Well worth half an hour if you are in the area.

Books: that obscure object of desire

To track down books that are out of print, highly specialised or otherwise unlikely to be carried by the local bookstore, check out www.abebooks.com.au, the website of AbeBooks Australia-New Zealand, the local site for AbeBooks International, an online bookseller offering more than 110 million new, used, rare and out-of-print books from a worldwide chain of thousands of booksellers.

Founded in 1995 by two couples from Victoria, British Columbia, AbeBooks went live in 1996 and has been a highly successful operation. It was acquired by Amazon.com in December 2008 but remains a stand-alone operation with headquarters in Victoria B.C. and a European office in Dusseldorf.

Australia-New Zealand readers logging on to the ANZ site have the option to have ANZ booksellers listed first, followed by all other booksellers. It can be set so that within those two lists the options are listed in rising order of price, which makes it easy either to select a good second-hand copy ahead of a new copy, or to compare prices of new copies from different booksellers.

There is a very good search engine; it is not necessary to have complete details of author, title and publisher – it will return a list of all books which comply with any word entered into any of the search fields. If the list is too long it can be narrowed by a follow-up search of that list. In my experience the descriptions of second hand books are very reliable – when a book is described as “very fine” or “as new”, that is the way it is. Books are well wrapped and all the ones I have ordered have arrived undamaged.

There really is an enormous range; I have been able to acquire items ranging from a 1963 paperback edition of Richard N. Frye’s Heritage of Persia for $US1.00 plus postage (a lot more than $US1.00!) to a new copy of the latest edition of The Times Comprehensive Atlas of the World.

Finally, a tip. Do not assume that the ANZ option will be the cheapest for ANZ buyers just because the postage will be less. It is worth looking at overseas options – I have found new books at U.S. booksellers for which the delivered price is about half the delivered price from a local ANZ bookseller.

North American readers can go direct to the U.S. site www.abebooks.com, and U.K. and European readers can go to the U.K. site www.abebooks.co.uk, which quotes prices in GBP rather than USD.