Unfortunately, no one looks at slides anymore and the only way for me to check them out would be to find, or fashion, a projector. This would happen exactly once in my lifetime, then the pictures would be stored away, never to be seen again.
The solution is to digitise them. This presents problems, all relating to money.
If I send them away to a company to digitise, it will cost a fortune and the quality will likely be pants. If I send them away to a company to do them properly it will cost more than buying my own studio in the Bahamas full of photography equipment, yachts and supermodels.
Clearly, these are infeasible.
The second solution was to buy a scanner and scan them in myself. My time is worth nothing to anyone, so I win on that front. Unfortunately I don't win on the buying a scanner front. For the kind of scanner I would want (top of the line of course) it would be just shy of one thousand dollars.
Clearly this is also unfeasible.
To make scanning matters worse, in order to get the best quality scans possible, you have to employ a wet scanning process. Once you've invested in the 1,000 USD scanner you behoove yourself to go the whole hog, buy the fluid and gloves, and scan everything in properly.
This is terrible and I would hate myself every time I squirted a tenners worth of mineral oil all over my scanner.
For psychological reasons, then, scanning is less than ideal.
The final alternative is something Grandad unwittingly provided for me.
Back in the good old days, the easiest way to reproduce a slide, enlarging areas or changing the shot, was to buy a big tube with a slide holder on the end, which twisted and turned every which way to line the slide up correctly. You could then twist the cheap, plasticky barrel to zoom in and rearrange the shot. Hold this monstrosity up to the light and presto, you have a new negative or slide of your original photo.
Grandad had one of these, which I didn't think anything of (I'm not reproducing his pictures, enlarging or cropping them with film) until it came time to wonder as to how to commit his slides to digital.
I wondered how to best go about the process, and while mulling it over came to the realisation that a lot of people use their digital cameras to commit prints, negatives and slides to their computers.
Clearly, I was onto a winner.
So without delay I found a Beschoi adapter for C/Y to EOS mounts (this adapter has no way of releasing the C/Y half of the setup without long nails and/or 3 sets of hands, so I cannot recommend it) and hooked it up to my camera.
This is a sample shot. You'll notice it's on the piss. That's fine, I can fix that with a rulers or a level.
One of the great things with this system is that once it's set up I can slide the slides in and out quickly, take a ton of simple pictures at this decent level of quality (this picture was taken with 10 seconds of setup pointing at a lamp) and then pick out the ones I want to do properly. To do them 'properly,' is then a case of bracketing however many shots, shoving them into photoshop and asking it to do the rest. This will give a nice dynamic range, ensuring as much of the subtlety of film is captured as possible.
Another bonus with this bizarre setup is that I can zoom in 2.4x the original size, so I could go absolutely overboard and capture however many shots zoomed in, then recomposite the final image in photoshop to ensure the maximum quality. (each of those images would have to be bracketed, so dozens of images. Clearly something I might only consider for the single best photograph in his entire collection).
So I think this will do.
It's not as good as wet scanning with an Epson V850 or whatever the hell - but it is a lot cheaper.
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