Slide Collection Project
From Superk
It's a huge project (to me). I'm trying to digitize and share a fairly large collection of family photos that are currently in slide format (about 500+). Needless to say, this is going to take some time! But I think the reward will be well worth the effort.
The Goals
The goals are simple... To provide and archive all the slides into a digital format that is easy to view, share, access and even learn from. Most of this slide collection dates from the late 1950's to the late 1980's and covers just about everything in between. It comes from my father who is a fantastic photographer. Most notable in this collection is the fact that my parents were fortunate enough to be able to spend an entire year living in Europe. They spent a large majority of that time traveling and documenting their time there in photographs.
The late 1960's were a different time. No, I'm not referring to much of the radical changes that were occuring socially, but to the amount of "olde world" that still existed in traveling Europe which has largely evaporated today (from what I'm told - I'm no world traveler). Mom & Dad always talk of their travels as possessing a feeling of "touching history" that is hard to imagine today. Their photos reflect some of that.
But it's more than the photos of the beautiful things they have seen and done. There are nearly two whole generations worth of our family history locked up in these photos and it's my goal to both relive and preserve them. Thus this project was born.
Unfortunately, my parents disposed of a good portion of the old photos before making their retirement move to Arizona. Packing and moving boxes and boxes of slides just isn't always a simple thing to do. So it is my hope that by preserving these photos digitally, it will never be a chore to take them with us again.
The Hardware
Being the computer geek that I am, I have to write up a short profile of what hardware I've been fortunate enough to borrow for this project. I'm not going to review it, but simply mention it. The Nikon Coolscan LS-2000 is a nice little peice of hardware, despite being somewhat dated now. It uses a SCSI interface that tends to be pretty picky. While it's supported by older versions of the Mac OS, it's not supported within OS X which forces me into Windows unfortunately. I'd like to try it in Linux before I have to take it back, so keep an eye out for a more thorough Nikon Coolscan LS-2000 review on here sometime in the future.
The imaging software that comes with the LS-2000 is a Windows/Mac Classic only package that actually does an impressive job of handling the scanning and image manipulation. I have found so far that the built-in auto color correction does a pretty decent job with almost all the slides I pass through it. Only occasionally do I have to manually tweak to the color adjustment curves. I wouldn't expect any further review of this software though since I'm not much of a Windows user these days.
The majority of the image manipulation and slideshow creation/editing/mastering is being done on a Mac. While Linux still remains my favorite OS, OS X really does appeal to me these days. The whole process of slide -> TIFF -> Mac -> DVD seems to be a fairly straight-forward one when using OS X's built in tools. It's actually been fun!
