Monthly Archives: March 2018

Digitizing slides

Motorcycles, Photographers, Technique

Micro Nikkor to the rescue.

I have some old Kodachrome slides I wanted to digitize, but my Canon and Nikon dedicated film scanners were sold long ago. My first attempt was using an Epson 2450 flat bed scanner with transillumination and a dedicated film holder. The result was awful.

An alternative method suggested itself, using my 55mm Micro Nikkor macro lens, an optic of exceptional performance in the close-up range, fitted to a Panasonic GX7 MFT body using an inexpensive adapter. The Nikkor goes down to 1/2 life size on a full frame body, but down to life-size on MFT. Nice, as the 35mm slide will exactly fill the MFT sensor in 3:2 mode.

Here’s the setup:

An iPad is used as an illumination source/light-box. After experimenting I found that 2 sheets of wax paper (from the kitchen) had to be used between the slide and the iPad, otherwise the latter’s pixels would show. Parallelism is a piece of cake – just align the camera until all four sides of the opening in the slide mount are parallel to the frame in the finder or on the LCD screen. Here’s the rear view:

Even with the LCD blurred you can see that the slide is correctly aligned. The screen magnification function in the GX7 is used to establish critical focus with the MF Nikkor, as easy as it gets.

Exposure on a very solid tripod and head was made using the electronic shutter of the GX7 which is truly vibrationless. I made five exposures at one stop intervals, thinking that HDR merging might help. The Nikkor was set at f/8, its sweet spot.

The original slide has exceptionally high contrast and HDR merging did nothing to improve matters. So after importing the best image from the GX7 into LR I dropped it into PS CS5 and messed about with curves and exposure, not to mention the magic lasso on the faces, coming up with something half decent.


The original slide photographed with the GX7 and Micro-Nikkor.


The massaged image after some time in Photoshop.

That photograph was taken on June 16, 1990 in lovely Encino, Los Angeles, when the original owner (left, above) of my BMW R90/6 motorcycle delivered it to me upon sale. I continue to ride it to this day! Other than the top case and some better shocks, it remains pretty much stock, right down to the mechanical points ignition which is as reliable as a hammer. The difference between this machine and modern bikes is that the latter will be useless junk 25 years hence when replacements for failed electronics are no longer available, whereas the R90 – whose electronic content is zero – will be happily soldiering along, hopefully with my son riding it. Oh! and I should add, modern BMW machine are ugly rubbish. This is how a motorcycle should look:


My 1975 R90/6 airhead twin in Scottsdale at my home, snapped the other day.

The bike runs as well as it did 28 years ago and no, I do not miss slide film or film of any kind, for that matter. How on earth did we exist before digital?

Film image: Olympus Stylus Quartz. Digital: Panasonic GX7.

MIT

Colleges, Photographs

Where Slide Rules rule.

Traveling home for Spring Break my son’s school bus got him as far as Logan Airport in Boston, and in Boston he remains, for now. Brutal weather and high winds saw to it that all flights from BOS were cancelled, and can you wonder when you contemplate the sheer idiocy of the location? Quarterly flooding? You bet. High winds? Guaranteed.


Boston Logan. A third world airport in the greatest nation on earth.

I have flown in and out of this miserable airport many times and my ‘on time’ experience comprises maybe 10% of those occasions. As does my son’s.

Still, not all is bad as our good friend Santo, who lives in nearby Lexington, offered to put Winston up for the night while we rebooked flights a day later. And what with Lexington being but 10 miles from the center of the engineering world, The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Winnie and Santo decamped to MIT to check out the museum.

And just think. Without MIT we would all be speaking German, would not have walked on the moon and there would be no microprocessors or iPhones. Without a shadow of a doubt this is the premier engineering school in the world.

One pleasant outcome of their visit was a host of images Santo sent over and one in particular caught my imagination.

Santo used a Samsung SM-G930U cell phone to make the image which I slightly enhanced in Lightroom.

The two giant slide rules (how did they do that?) took me back to my days as an engineering student. At that time the only calculating device permitted in the exam room was the slide rule. A couple of rich kids had the fancy American Texas Instruments calculators but the British sense of fairness and desire for level playing fields (unless you were in one of their colonies) prohibited these magical devices at exam time. Appropriately, two of TI’s four founders were MIT men.

The two slide rules in the above image are a Pickett, top and a Keuffel and Esser. The Pickett is distinguished by its all metal construction, making it lighter and more durable, so much so that it was Buzz Aldrin’s tool of choice on the Apollo 11 mission which saw men first walk on the moon. Yup, MIT got us to the moon but the microprocessor had yet to be invented.

Slide rules are beautiful things and you can pick up normal sized versions of either of the above on eBay for pennies. My Faber Castell remains on display at home:

Thank you, Santo, for bringing back those pleasant memories when my net worth consisted of one Leica and three lenses along with one change of clothes! I rather imagine my son will have an easier time of it.


Winston at the unromantically named ‘Building 10’and Great Dome, on Killian Court, MIT.