for the good time Jerry’s ramblings…

During our Christmas visit to Arizona, Katie and I pulled out all of Katie’s parents’ old slides and enjoyed an old school slideshow, including the circa 1970 Honewell slide projector, dog eared slides, and a lot of manual effort.

Katie, Min and Staci

I really want to digitize many of these slides, especially some of the early Katie photos. One possibly easy option would be to just ship them off and have the scans done by somebody else. I believe that would cost around $400 and given my interest in DIY projects, that wouldn’t be at all satisfying. So I looked into some other options.

1) Buy a scanner designed to do this

We already have a Canon LIDE 600 that supports scanning of negatives, but baffling to me is that it does not support slides. Other options are dedicated slide and film scanners, but I’m confident the quality of those would be poor for the money I want to spend.

2) Buy an attachment for my SLR

Opteka Slide Copier

I found this Opteka HD2 Slide Copier which seemed like an attractive option. But it is $50 and has no useful purpose beyond copying slides

3) Buy a macro extension kit for my SLR lenses.

Kenko Macro Extension Tube Set

I’ve been wanting macro extenders such as these Kenko macro extender tubes for quite some time just for general photography. Since they can serve the dual purpose of a slide copier, they are an attractive option.

Decision: macro extenders

The copy setup requires a little bit of equipment:

1. SLR camera
2. Macro extender tubes (I used 56mm total)
3. An old, broken enlarger (makes an awesome copy stand)
4. Slide light box

Homebrew Digital Slide Copier

For copying many slides, I’ll probably build a simple jig for framing exactly where the slide needs to be for proper cropping and focus. The net result isn’t bad! Check out that Coppertone tan!

Where the sun don't shine