http://norman.walsh.name/2004/11/23/kodachrome 7 203 2004-11-23T07:04:36-05:00 $Date: 2005-09-11 10:27:02 -0400 (Sun, 11 Sep 2005) $ Norman Walsh 2004 Norman Walsh Some of the first few images to come through my new film scanner. Rachel Carson The lasting pleasures of contact with the natural world are not reserved for scientists but are available to anyone who will place himself under the influence of the earth, sea and sky and their amazing life. A few months ago, Deb Walsh and I decided to see about actually getting some of our better pictures framed and put up on the walls. Walls, I might add, that had been anxiously awaiting this development for several years. Getting the digital ones cropped, printed, and framed was dead easy. But a whole lot of our current collection is on film and that's harder to deal with. Finding the pictures in our albums was easy, finding the negatives wasn't (very) hard (at least finding the right box wasn't too hard), but the process of selecting the individual images, keeping track of the film strips, getting specific images printed, and dealing with any cropping or other adjustments we might like looked really hard. Scanning the prints produced pretty poor results (on our cheap all-in-one scanner, printer, fax combo, so that was to be expected, I think). I tried unsuccessfully to find a friend or colleague with a film scanner that I could borrow. Then it hit me. I'm not actually expecting to produce much more film in my lifetime, all I really need is a way of converting the legacy. The answer was obvious: buy a film scanner on eBay, scan the negatives, and sell it again. Duh! This internet thing, I think it might catch on. And that's just what I did. Selecting and bidding unsuccessfully on several scanners before winning a CoolScan IV ED. It's not the absolute top-of-the line in film scanners these days with a physical resolution of 2900dpi but it does include hardware assisted dust and scratch removal (that works fabulously). It's plenty sufficient for our immediate needs. And more. Shortly before my Uncle Ed passed away, he mailed me a small handful of slides. I've never had them printed and lacking a projector, I've never seen them except as tiny images held in front of a lamp. Yesterday it occurred to me that I could just as easily scan those too. The first image is from November, 1951. It's clearly my dad, but it's like nothing I recall seeing before. The second image is from June, 1968. I'm only a year old and I've made him bald already! That scanner paid for itself on about day three, I think.