My Setup For Copying Transparencies Onto Digital

[Harold Gough]

This was an offshoot of this project:

http://www.photomacrography.net/forum/v ... hp?t=12349

I have thousands of transparencies of fine-grain film and the quickest way to share them here seemed to be to use a macro lens, my Olympus OM slide copiers and my OM flash.

Essentially, I used my OM flash, tilted downwards slightly, to illuminate a white card behind the slide copier. This would give a standard level of illumination to all the images, the lightness or darkness of principle parts of the image having no influence on the exposure on the sensor.

In these illustrative images of the hardware:

a) A wall stands in for the white card
b) The digital camera is missing from the righthand end of the setup as I needed it to take these shots.
c) AFor clarity, tripod was used, whereas in actual use, the digital camera and lens/below/copier combination are usually rested on top of a filing cabinet.

Hardware (copying unit, right to left):

a) Olympus E-P2 m4/3 camera (omitted in images) in M or S mode, 1/60 second, ISI 100 *
b) Olympus T32 set manually (not shown here, see final image and details) mounted on the hot shoe
c) Leica-R to m4/3 adapter
d) Leitz Elmarit 60mm macro lens
e) Reverse adapter
f) Olympus OM auto bellows (front stand reversed and nearest the camera, rear stand reversed and nearest the copier)
g) Blackened 49mm cardboard cylinder (from inside toilet roll), to link bellows to copier
h) Olympus OM slide copier

Total extension (working distance) 88mm (excluding distance to film emulsion, ca 32mm).

The kit 14-42mm lens was used for these shots of the hardware.



Showing a card-mounted transparency in position.



A view of the slide copier. (Vertical movements possible).



Settings on back panel of T32: ISO 25 f4:




Some of the results:

http://www.photomacrography.net/forum/v ... hp?t=16977

* The sensor was found to be much more sensitive than film to the film flash. See the first link cited for details.

Harold

[DQE]

A nice setup, and some very nice results from its use!
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100 lifetimes ago, while employed as a staff scientist at the Kodak Research Labs, I was always amazed how much very expensive equipment and how many staff were required to extract something close to the maximum image quality from color slides or color negatives. Mostly, a very high-resolution scanning microdensitometer was used, with the "PDS 1010" unit being most commonly used. In my own lab, we used similar instrumentation, adapted for black-and-white radiographic images, for our image quality research as well as digitizing radiographs at close to maximum achievable image quality.

While I never did any comparisons of different approaches, a carefully used high-quality setup like yours appears to extract very high image quality from your slides.

[Harold Gough]

Thanks, Phil,

Essentially, the digital sensor is the only significant difference from its use in the 1980s.

I am happy will the quality for posting here.

It used to be common practice to copy tranparancies. There were two levels of quality: low for projection, high for publication. I still have a pile of Kodak copying film in my freezer.

For professional purposes, even digital JPEGs have to be saved at quality 12 in Photoshop, and with a limited amount of sharpening.

Harold