Easy way to scan old slides

Me at the Granby Zoo in 1975

Old slides are great because most of the time they've been in a protected state for many years and they are for the most part in pristine condition.

My Grand Father and his boat Lake Champlain Vermont 1974

I recently came across a bunch of them that have been sitting in a closet for almost 30 years and since no prints existed of those images, I felt it was important to scan them into digital format.

1975 Mack Firetruck, the detail is just amazing

Now some scanners are equiped to do such things but wouldn't you know it mine is not. So I had to find an easy way to scan those slides.

Turns out I had all the necessary material at hand. I took a toilet paper roll, 2 businness cards and some masking tape to cut and assemble myslef a slide holder. I then used my digital camera in macro mode with the contraption attached to the lens, pointed it at a uniform light source and bingo, digital image of the slide. Make sure you set the camera at maximum image quality, you'll be dumping a lot of the captured image when cropping.

It doesn't look pretty but it works

After that it was just a question of cropping the image in GIMP, you can do it with any image editing program and I was done.

This is what you get with the camera and the contraption attached to it.

Some of the images are very cool and some have been out of sight and out of mind for a very long time. So go dig'em out of the closet and start reviving your past.

Same image after cropping and tweaking in an image editor.

Thanks for watching.

Gerry :)