Okay so I’ve been slowly working my way through, my thousands of rolls of slides, and negatives. This has been an ongoing project of mine since I bought my Nikon Coolscan LS 8000, about 9 years ago. I was literally one of the first to have one of these great scanners, I had pre ordered it about 6 months, before it was even shipping, however I did recently sell it, and have to say it had retained it’s value better than any digital equipment I’ve owned to date.
Well I was just about to give up,(on scanning that is) and than I read about camera scanning, and I was like, how come I didn’t think of this. Last year I purchased a Full Frame DSLR, Canon 1Ds Mark III. Basically it is the same setup as using a slide duplicator.
I bought a Canon 100mm macro f 2.8, this by the way is one of Canons sharpest lenses, even if you don’t use the macro feature. I found this little company in Tulsa OK, called “Photosolve” these guys make a product called the “extend a slide”. Well I just want to post a rave, the product works flawlessly, and I can tell you that it is really well made, all machined steel, and a great magnetic system for locking your slides and negs in place to do the copy work.
You basically set it up, follow the instructions, and just drop your slides in one after the other. I’m shooting in RAW, and then converting my raw files to .dng format for archiving. I truly believe that in the years to come, .dng is going to win the file format wars, and everyone will adapt to it, like .pdf. I’m than importing into lightroom, and keywording the images, by subject matter.
Well camera scanning negs, is a bit more work, but it to can be done, Photosolve has a great article on how to do this, 90% of my collection is slides, so I haven’t tried this yet, but I don’t see any reason why this would not work flawlessly.
Just for kicks and giggles here is one of my Camera Scans of Mom and Dad, I left the image uncropped, this image was shot on Kodachrome, which I always had trouble scanning. This was probably like Circa 1962 or 63, I think Coney Island.
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