Day Fifty-nine: late evening of September 30th 2009

I was writing a response to a fellow teacher, about an image that was on his Facebook page, and I mentioned being in Puerto Rico with the Coast Guard in the early 70s. He is a serious photographer, and as I was describing what I saw, I remembered the photos that I took when I was there. I decided to see if I could find them, along with some other photos that I took, and upload them.

The big issue was the fact that all my old shots were transparencies, so I had to convert the old technology into a digital format.

First, of course I had to locate my slides. Not too hard, because they had been stored and moderately organized. I found a number of labeled boxes in about a half an hour. Now I could begin the scanning. Of course, the operation that I felt the most confident about was the one that took the most time.

The scanner is new, a CanoScan LiDE 700F, and a nice machine at that. It came with a adapter for scanning film strips, but not single slides. I had to remove the film from the cardboard slide, before I could actually scan it. Next, I set the film in the adapter in the first position closest to the top of the scanner. The separate light source is place over the film (some scanners have a light source built into the cover). Here is where the hitch occurred, I couldn’t find the Canon application that could scan the slide. I don’t know where it went. I tried VueScan, my Swiss Army scanning application, but it didn’t sync with the scanner for film (It worked with printed material). So, I had to reinstall the original software and then update that so the Snow Leopard operating system would work with it. Once this was done, I attempted to scan the film. The application opened, I selected the film setting, the resolution change to 1200 dpi, and I gave it a shot-BAM. It worked, although it was a bit off center, that could be handled in Photoshop. Just to make sure that I could align things correctly, I tried a second attempt (I also removed some dust) with slightly better results. I was happy, but realized that the operation was time consuming, and I’d have to get some waxed sleeves to protect the frameless transparency. I’ve included a reduced JPEG below. The irregular light quality of the ground is due to the broken cloud cover that I though added a bit of drama and depth to the landscape.