Domestic Digitising Doings 04: I Can See Clearly Now I'm... Using Apparatus

 The project to digitise an estimated 5,000+ of my family’s photographic slide collection is well under way, indeed I’m merrily feeding slides into the hungry scanner as I type.

A niggling issue I’ve encountered is how to view the slides BEFORE scanning. Why do I need to do this? Two reasons – firstly to thin out any duplicate shots, particularly of trains (I’ve made a rule to not dispose of anything with a family member in, even me…), and secondly to return the slides to some semblance of chronological shot order after decades of being haphazardly pulled in and out of their boxes and generally jumbled up. 

With the traditional method of holding slides up to the light and squinting being both unsatisfactory and eye-strainy, and setting up a projector being a bit unwieldy, we are lucky to have this….

A VIEW TO A VIEW


The technology of the future! The future of - the 1970s.

I’ve a real soft spot for this slide viewer, partly because I remember sitting as a child and being enthralled by popping slides in and out, and partly because this model of viewer formed the screens in the motion-tracker props in the 1986 sci-fi classic ‘Aliens’, a film I adore.



'They're coming out of the goddam walls! Also they seem to be painted British Rail blue'

The viewer was useful for choosing between two or three very similar slides for disposal (to be listed on eBay eventually - keep an eye out for some B-grade train photos from the ‘70s and ‘80s), but it was difficult to view slides in context of the rest of their box and re-construct a sequence of shots. In fact it rapidly proved rather fiddly. What I really wanted was something which would allow me to lay out, assess and re-arrange 30+ slides simultaneously without faffing about with the scanner at this stage. That something turned out to be...

AND SO IT CAME TO PASS THAT THE TABLE LIT UP

It glows! 

Purchased from a well-known rainforest-monikered internet store, the AGPtek Ultra-Thin Real A3 Light Box LED is intended primarily as a tracing table for sketching/animation but has been superb at illuminating a whole box of slides at a time, enabling images to be re-ordered and put in sequence quite readily. Learning lessons from the first few boxes, which were scanned largely as found and rather disordered, the rest of the project will at least have some level of internal consistency even if adjacent boxes of slides hop around in time despite my best sorting efforts.

A hive of activity. Like a bee hive but with more coffee than honey.

I estimate there's around 150 boxes, packets and magazines of slides to process so after the first experimental steps it’s a relief to have something of a production line set up. Also I’m really enjoying it. Judge not.

TO BE CONTINUED...

 

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