Transparencies - Through a scanner darkly

It was a by-product of testing out a 30 year old slide projector, to see if it still worked. It needed a little knock to shake it into action but it is fine. There in front of me were about 160 35mm slides from the late 70s and early 80s just waiting to be brought into the digital age.

So while trying to do other things, not very productively, these slides have been fed through my Epson V500 scanner four at a time......

What they had in common was a certain darkness about them, but easy to tweak in scanning just to leave some final adjustments in Lightroom. Taken so long ago, with many of these transparencies in their plain mounts, it was difficult to tell right from left and often memory was not going to help. This image was on Kodachrome, which because of the markings on the cardboard slide holders I consistently scanned the wrong way around, but then all were easily mirrored because of that.

Bourdeilles on the River Dronne, Perigord, France

The other trick that memory plays is forgetting where this is! To identify the town as Bourdeilles, the river as the Dronne and the region as the Dordogne, I had to view this and 4 other images from the same location closely before identifying a faint hotel sign "les Griffons" and everything else led from a Google search on that.

In an age when vintage film effects are sought after by instagrammers and the like, there just may be a market for the real thing. What I guess I have to do is avoid making things too perfect - there is not much danger of that with my less than top-end scanner. But it's good enough.

Here's another from the same town. Again presented more or less as is, the cars age the image. This is 1981. You'll find more in my Rural France gallery.

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Bourdeilles, Perigord, France - 1981

I have also started a new gallery that I shall call "Vintage Film". There are only images from France at the time I post this but that will change.