Tag Archives: photography

Scanning Slides With the Plustek OpticFilm 8200

by

My Dad was a great photographer. With his 35mm Kodak Signet, and Zeiss Ikon folding medium format rangefinder, he shot a ton of slides that he would bring out from time to time for a “movie” show. Somehow, when he died, I became the custodian of his pictures. When I picked up a Carousel projector for my own slides, I organized his slides into a couple of standing carousel shows.

Every now and then, some family member has asked about getting copies or scans of the slides. Every now and then, I’d think about transferring them to digital, look into the matter, and come away with these options, all of them bad:

  • Have them scanned locally by a camera store, at about a $1 a slide. I did this for a couple of my own slides for a funeral; the quality was atrocious. The scans were blurry, the contrast was muddy, and the color was shitty. There is no way I was going to let them do more.
  • Send them out to a digitizing service. Aside from the inherent risk of sending them out at all, I’ve read that the lower priced services actually send the slides overseas, where labor costs are lower. No way. There are services that do the work domestically, but they’re higher priced—on the order of $3-6 apiece. I may still explore this option for his medium format slides.
  • Get a scanner, and scan them myself. This would entail the cost of the scanner, plus my own time scanning and post processing the slides. For the longest time, the only scanner I could find that looked like it had quality I could live with was the Nikon CoolScan series. The only problem was that they were $2000 – $5000 — and no longer available. Every now and then I would desultorily look at eBay to see if they had one I could afford at the moment, and come away empty handed.
  • Get a cheap scanner. My mother actually got one for me for Christmas, but it turned out to be Windows only. I tend to doubt I would have been happy with the quality.

Finally, about a year ago, I started reading about the Plustek OpticFilm series of scanners. I saw some sample images, and they looked good. I checked the reviews, and they were mostly good, with the caveat that there was a learning curve involved, so last March, I bit the bullet, and bought one. Continue reading →

Seal Dive

by

I went on a seal dive today. With the weather we had, it didn’t start out well–swells were predicted, and as we were waiting to get on the boat, the heavens opened up and it started pour. After a half hour hold, the captain decided to take us to the Salvages, an outcropping of rocks off the coast of Rockport, rather than the Isle of Shoals off Portsmouth.

We got to the Salvages, and fortunately, the seas weren’t as choppy as predicted, though it did still rain off and on. As we anchored, we could see seals peeking at us from the water surrounding the  rocks.

For me, the first dive was frankly an abortion. I started off the dive with the back of my wetsuit open; all six of us were in the water together; I ended up following the wrong person, the three of us got separated from the dive leader, I led the other two in the wrong direction, and we were never able to reconnect, and all six of us ended up heading in the wrong direction, away from the seals. And the camera strobe stopped firing. Unfortunately, two of the divers had only brought a single tank.

The second dive was better. The captain moved us a little closer to the rocks, and we went down the anchor line and just hung out there. With the strobe out of commission, I put the camera ISO as high as I could, put it back in program mode, and shot with existing light. Eventually a seal showed up, and watched us from a lobster trap line:

Seal by the lobster line Seal by the lobster line Seal by the lobster line

 

Nahanton Downstream

Gallery

by
Among the radio antennas

This gallery contains 3 photos.

Sunday, I paddled downstream from Charles River and Canoe and Kayak’s Nanhanton Park location. Unlike the upstream side, which runs about 14 miles, this is about a two mile trip before you have to stop just short of the Silk Mill Dam. The river is narrower, and the trees crowd the river, providing lots of shade. There are many more human structures nearby, starting with the radio towers looming in the distance. Continue reading →

First Cover

by

Last June, I visited the Quechee Vermont Balloon Festival, and was lucky enough to take my first balloon ride. I greatly enjoyed it and took a ton of pictures. You can read more about it here.

Upper Valley Life May/June cover

Upper Valley Life 
May/June 2013 issue

The Festival has a photography contest, and I entered four pictures into it. I didn’t think anything more about it, until I was contacted by the Art Director of Upper Valley Life, a magazine devoted to the Upper Valley region of Vermont and New Hampshire. The festival had apparently passed along a bunch of their submissions, they liked one of my pictures, and wanted to know if it was OK to use it for their May/June cover!

This is my first published photograph, and I am tremendously pleased and honored.

 

Sea Rovers 2013

by

This past weekend I attended the 2013 Boston Sea Rovers Annual Clinic. The Sea Rovers are one of the oldest dive clubs around, having been founded back in the 1950s, and boasting such past and present members as underwater cinematographer Stan Waterman, explorer Robert Ballard and photographer Ernest ‘Ernie’ Brooks II.   The Clinic is an annual divers show in the Boston area, and is split between an exhibition hall, hourly seminars, and a film festival. During the day, each hour, there are three seminars; each seminar room is devoted to a certain theme, but you’re free to attend any one you wish. The exhibition hall is typically split between manufacturers (often of technical diving gear), local retailers, local dive clubs, and other organizations, like the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries, The Stellwagen National Marine Sanctuary, and others. The Clinic is also a great place to re-connect with old friends. Continue reading →

Last Paddle of the Season

by

Today was my last kayaking trip of the season. I’ve had a season pass this year at Charles River Canoe and Kayak, and wanted to go one last time before they transfer over to the  Weston Ski Track for the winter. The weather was sunny, but seasonably chilly — a little over 50°, I’d guess. With water temperatures in the forties, though, wet suits were required,  so I wore my diving 7mm suit.

I wasn’t the only one on the river, either. As I was getting ready on the dock, a guy in a dry suit was returning on a stand up paddle board, and I saw a couple of other folks in kayaks over the course of the trip. It was fairly comfortable while I was in the sun; slightly chilly when I was in the shade. All the maples, and many of the other trees, had lost all their leaves, but the oaks still had their leaves, brown, but just beginning to drop. Continue reading →

Last Dive of the Season

Gallery

by
Hermit Crab

This gallery contains 9 photos.

I did my last dive of the season today. There were three of us, plus Dan Easa of East Coast Divers, and we ended up at Old Garden Beach in Rockport. Despite the impending storm two days away, the sea was flat, and the sun was relatively warm once the fog burned off. Once we were in the water, we snorkeled out to about get some depth under us, then descended. We swam over the sandy bottom, then moved further out into the rocks. There were lots of crabs, of several different sorts, plus we saw a sea robin and a school of fish. Continue reading →