I have a number of colour slides that I took many years ago and since I no longer have a slide projector it is some time since I last saw these properly. I wanted to get the slides into JPEG format and I thought I could use my mobile phone screen, or tablet screen, to use as a backlight while I photographed the images using my Fuji X-T2 on a tripod.
I set up the camera on the tripod with the central column reversed so that I could point the camera at the desk on which the tripod was sitting (this will be clearer in image 1, below) and placed the slides on the phone with a plain white screen. I zoomed and focused the camera on the image on the slide, set the aperture at f5.6 to get to the area of best lens performance and to allow a medium depth of field because DoF is very shallow in close up photography. I set the focal length of the lens around 50mm (75mm equivalent in terms of a 35mm full frame camera) and used a spirit level to ensure the camera and lightbox were parallel to each other. I used a cable release to avoid vibration. I also set the camera shutter to electronic mode to avoid any vibration that may be caused by the action of the manual shutter (this may have been unnecessary but it certainly did no harm).
To keep the screen of the phone illuminated I adjusted the auto screen switch off to 30 minutes and plugged a charger into the phone to ensure the battery didn't die on me.
Once the slides had been dusted and prepared the photos were taken. This gave a qualified success. The problem was that the photos had an overall pattern of the phone screen pixels which gave a 'fabric' like texture to the photos.
Using the limited DoF to my advantage I thought I would create a 'light box' to place between the phone screen and the slide. I used an old shallow box and cut out an aperture the same size as the slide image and then glued the cut out piece appropriately spaced to form a guide to align the slide to the aperture whilst the slide remains in its mount. See images 2 and 3.
The slides were then photographed to
produce RAW files for editing in Lightroom. The slides had been in storage for many years (you may make out the date on the slide is October '77 - yes 40 years old!) and some mould marks had appeared. These were edited in Lightroom using the heal tool - see before and after sample in image 4.
All in all I am very happy to be able to see these photographs again after so many years. Getting them into JPEGs also means that I can share them with family members via email and shared hosting sites.
The final image, image 5, shows the extension tubes I bought from Amazon for a very modest price.
