Digitising Glass Slides

[langcliffe]

I have acquired about 40 glass slides associated with the Frederic Riley collection. They include a few of Hastings' photographs of Gaping Gill dating back to the 1900s, and at least one Harold Rhodes photograph. I think that they may be too far gone for effective digitisation, but what I know about such things can be written on the back of a very small postage stamp.

Is anyone with the appropriate equipment in a position to digitise a small sample to see if they are worth digitising for the BCRA Online Archive?

 

[langcliffe]

Someone has kindly pointed out that I haven't given their size. They are, more-or-less as I don't know what to measure, 3" by 3" (7.6 cm to those born after 1950).

 

[Fulk]

Have you go a light-box (or something that could be utilized as such)?

If so, you could try putting the slides on the light-box, mounting a digital camera on a tripod and simply photographing the slides – ?

(I'm assuming that they're B&W so colour balance won't be a problem.)

 

[Jim MacPherson]

Might be worth posting on Buddlepit as well as there may be one or two contributors there who might have specialist knowledge as well.

Jim

 

[blackshiver]

Langcliffe - you will be surprised what you can do with old slides and a phone / camera, have a go and see if it works for you.
I did some archive ones a while back and they worked well......This ones off a glass slide, backlit and taken with and Olympus Tough.

 

[pwhole]

If the photography route is chosen, it would be preferable to use a reasonably long focal length lens - 100mm (on full frame SLR) is usually the ideal compromise for reproduction, especially if it has a macro function as they're usually 1:1 scale. Any shorter and there's a danger of soft corners with wider apertures and possibly field curvature too, which in real terms means it won't all be in sharp focus at the same point. Depth of field at that range is very short unless stopped down to f11 or similar. At least glass slides are rigid and equal thickness, so once it is set up, it should be relatively easy to swap them and bash out loads.

That said, a flatbed scanner may do it well, if it has a slide-scanning facility? Though they may be too thick to close the lid properly, and scratching the scanner glass is also a risk.

 

[Sid]

Using a Epson flat bed scanner has had great success with glass slides in MCRA land.

 

[JonP]

@langcliffe I have all stuff to digitalise these.

 

[grahams]

Use phone as backlight on a flatbed scanner. Works perfectly.

 

[langcliffe]

I would like to offer genuine thanks to all the kind people who offered to help in this matter, but I am pleased to report that it shouldn't be necessary to call upon their offers.

Plans are afoot for the slides to be digitised and made available to the BCRA Online Archive, and for them to find a permanent home with the rest of the Frederic Riley collection in Settle.