Old NATs Photos on 35mm

[Chuck_Smith]

This upcoming year marks the 50th anniversary of our club, and as one the "originals" I was asked to see if I had any pictures of the early years.  I was at my mom's house for Thanksgiving and pulled out the boxes of slides. Didn't find the ones I wanted but I did find a few NATs shots from days gone by.

Some highlights include Al Rabe flying his Sea Fury, another of a particularly well known and distinctive ship - white with an asymmetrical  orange and black paint scheme (I'd forgotten how striking that pane was when it was new) sitting in the grass next to the runway, and sadly, what I think is a photo of the immediate aftermath of Dave Ree's T-38 Talon's crash.  I have picture of a Stott -style Chipmunk getting ready to fly but it's in the Later colors, I think Mike S's had crashed and he was flying the old version then so I don't know who it is, but maybe my memory is a bit lacking. Some combat too with some guy with a bunch of Nemesis'. Some are also, unfortunately, on 110 slides.

Most of the slides have been ravaged by time and are really faded but still a handful of really neat ones remain.

I'd love to share but don't have a 35mm converter, what's an economical way to get them digitized?

Chuck

[Mike Scholtes]

Hi Chuck - There are fairly inexpensive machines that do the slide-to-digital conversion, in the $100 range, and professional services that will do the conversion at higher resolution. I researched this a few months back when figuring out how to preserve slides going back to 1947 and there is a lot available. I will review my search results and follow up here. I concluded it is best to use the service since I have over 1000 to convert, but smaller scale projects would be fine with a home machine. The machines and the professional services also can enhance old slides to improve the color and resolution. The service I intend to use manually views and works on each slide individually to get the best result. Surprisingly affordable.

[Mike Scholtes]

Have a look at the Wolverine line, especially the F2D 20 MP for about $150 ) does 35mm, 110, photos, negatives, and the SNAP20, also about $150.

There is a service in the Phoenix area my sister has used successfully called DigMyPics that hand-processes slides for a reasonable price.

[Steve Helmick]

To convert color slides to digital, my brother made a camera adapter himself that worked quite nicely. Based on a cardboard tube (back when a TP tube was structurally decent), with some bits of spruce and stuff, sprayed inside & out with flat black. Creating a good source of light is important. Some flood lights reflecting off a white wall worked ok. I attached 3 samples. Keep in mind that the slides were from '44 > '49, and I resized and compressed them.  Steve

[Mark_Gerber]

Check out Walmart.  My sister has had Walmart take hundreds of Dad's 35mm slides (he was an ardent photographer) and put them put on CDs.  They digitized two rolls of 8mm film for me of some 1960s control line flying and put it on a CD at a reasonable price. 

Mark Gerber

[11290]

If you have a DSLR with a "medium range" zoom lens, this works very well and does not cost a lot to make.

Make a sliding camera mount (1 x board with hole for a 1/4 - 20 bolt for tripod mount on camera), make a "box" of matte black poster board (WalMart), line up the slide placemount and an opening in the back of the box on the same center line of the camera (opening to match the size of the slide), put a "lightly frosted" clear plastic sheet over the opening (sanded mine lightly with 600 wet paper - need to diffuse the light), get a coffee can, put in a ceramic (china) lamp holder, mount the can on the center line of the lens and get a "daylight color temperature" twisty bulb (keeps the heat down so you don't melt the plastic and/or the slide) and insert into the coffee can. 

Take the cover off, put in a slide, put the cover back on, adjust the camera placement, zoom length, focus (use manual focus) and take a high resolution picture of the slide (best to use a remote shutter release).  Load the picture into a photo imaging software (I use PhotoShop Elements), then crop as required and do post processing.

Lot more time consuming to describe than it is to actually build and do the slide copy.  I did about 7000 slides about 9 years ago with this.  Boring for that many but they all came out great, especially considering some were from way back in the 1960's and some that I had actually developed and mounted while in Vietnam in 1969.

[EddyR]

Here is a method that works well and it will give the correct color balance. Take a  12"x12" piece of cardboard and cut hole large enough for entire slide image to show. Tape slide to cardboard and tape cardboard to window. Use digital camera to take picture. You can use close up lense if needed attached to front of your camera lense. The reason for using daylight is to get the light balance correct.  This cost nothing to try.