New Scanner Arrives

Phew! I can now start scanning again as my new scanner has arrived.

I wasn't actually sure that it was the scanner when it arrived - the box was big enough to hold at least half a dozen...

But after digging through all the shredded cardboard packaging inside I only found one box!

It's a Cannon 9000F flatbed and film scanner all in one, so I've been able to replace two separate scanners with just the one. Meant I had to tidy up my desk... duh!

So now I can scan not only my 35mm negatives and slides but the 120 roll film ones as well. And (pauses to let you get a bit excited) Miss Jeannie has given me a box of her father's 120 negatives showing Blackpool properties from the 1960s.

I might work my way slowly through those and take some photos from the same places for comparison with today! But of course I did have to have a go to see if it worked, so to compare yesterday's shots of Marsh Mill, Thornton, with the same place before the craft village was built, here's a shot from 1983/84.

Oh yes! It works!

Another Random Offering...

The slides are still going through the scanner slowly but surely. But still as mixed up as ever! So today's offering is a mixed one again!

Starting off with a visit to Blackpool Tower Circus sometime around 1979/1980. I'm not quite sure of the year. The photo is of an acrobatic troup who had the spot right at the end of the performance after the circus ring has sunk down to allow sea water to flood in.

It was always a spectacular end to the seasonal circus show but this troupe were quite spectacular themselves - semi-naked and coated in oil and glitter, they were almost as erotic as they were acrobatic - though you get some idea of the balance and strength required for their act in this photo... Try that with the missus, later tonight!

The next photo couldn't be much more different! St Chad's church, the Parish church of Rochdale, my birth town, taken again in 1979, several years after we had moved to Blackpool. Rochdale is an old town - mentioned in the Domesday Book and, of course, the place where Alan A'Dale comes from in the Robin Hood legends.

St Chads has a strange legend that it was to have been built at the foot of the high hilltop that it occupies, but that the collected building materials were moved each night to the top of the hill by supernatural means!

The next shot is from 1990 and one of Fleetwood's Tram Sunday events. These events invariably involve far more cars and buses than they do trams - in fact these days more than ever, due to Health & Safety rules keeping the trams from trundling slowly down Lord Street whilst visitors are wandering all over the road.

Back in 1990 we just used to push the crushed and dead bodies to the kerb with the side of a foot whilst we took our photos of the parked cars.

Like this 1950s Ford Popular. This was the last Ford "sit-up-and-beg" model before more modern styling gave them a flat boot that stuck out behind and a flatter shape to the bonnet that curved gently into the wings. Dad had one of these - his first car and I remember the great excitement when he came home with it. I must have been 5 or 6 at the time. I remember he spent as much time lying under it with a spanner in his hand as we did riding inside it...

And to finish with - a disdainful opening sentence with the word "and" at the front... and a shot of a 1940s London Routemaster bus on Blackpool's Golden Mile in (I think) 1985.

It was the start of the Routemasters disappearing from London streets and it was to the advantage of Blackpool as the Routemaster made a fabulous sight in its old Blackpool livery.

Scanning! I'm Scanning I'm Scanning I'm Scanning...

Yikes, I've taken a lot of photos over the years! I'm currently up to 13,750 files on my hard drive with 4,161 of them currently available from my Flickr account but with many more still to scan from years gone by!

I'm currently scanning slides of the Lake District and some of those are finding their way to Flickr. I'd collated lots of slides into collections of the same subject for projecting (remember those nights spent in the dark watching a big screen?) and that means they are jumbled up a bit so I can't easlily tell which were taken when.

So I'm having to cross reference with my black and white negatives and do some intelligent guesswork (that doesn't come easily!) as to when each one was taken.

I've gone through around 10 projector magazines each of 50 slides and am currently scanning through the albums of slides that I didn't have spare magazines for. I have 4 albums for slides each containing 20 sheets of storage pages each page with pockets for 20 slides. So that's 400 to an album and I'm on the third album.

Fans of the Blackpool photos may be interested to know that the fourth album is the one that contains most of the older Blackpool photos. And after that I've got four albums of black and white negatives to go at, each of which contains around 400 strips of 5 negatives - so around 8,000 black and white images! So a few months spare time still to go then...!

Film Scanner

Yesterday someone left a comment asking about the film scanner I use to scan my negatives.

It's a PrimeFilm 1800u which I bought in 2000 from Jessops.

At first I was a little disappointed but the software drivers, or my technique seem to have got better as I've upgraded through Windows95 to XP and now Vista. It seems to make a better job of colour negatives than it does black and white, which like colour slides have to be spot-on exposure otherwise trying to adjust seems to reduce the number of shades/colours to around eight giving a somewhat Salvador Dali effect...

For that reason I scan black and white negatives as colour and then convert to black and white once the image is in Paint Shop Pro. When scanning negatives and particularly slides which aren't stored in close fitting containers, dust can be a problem. Some of my slides are so dirty I just can't be bothered trying to clean up the thousands of black dots and just try to get rid of the larger blobs! On negatives the black spots are white of course. If the same mark shows on several photos it's because dust has fallen off a negative onto the light tray of the scanner. I keep a small artist's paintbrush that I use to periodically clean the tray.

Similarly if lines appear on the scanned picture it's a piece of dust that has got onto the moving lens that trundles out and over the negative so the paintbrush does for that as well. In nine years it's amazing how many particles seem to have fallen into the scanner and onto the white surface under the glass but, whilst I've worried about them and tried blowing through whatever gaps in the casing I can find in an effort to dislodge them, they don't seem to have any effect on the scanned image.

Nine years life for something like this isn't bad. It's been hammered over that time. I have around 30,000 negatives and slides and they are not quick things to scan. I still have a lot that have yet to be scanned, although I'm getting through them slowly! As technology moves on and monitors have got better resolution (and gone widescreen!) I find I now want to go back and rescan stuff that I did at the beginning! A never-ending job! Hope that helps, Travis!

Return to Technology Index Page