A question for those far more "tech savvy" then I will ever be is there a device that can convert older 35mm slides to a digital medium and yes it's aviation related. I have a ton of my father's old film from his days on survey crews with a variety of airplanes; Lockheed Electra, Hudson's, Mosquito, Bell 47's, Hiller's mostly in the high eastern Canadian Arctic but also some down in South America.

I'm betting someone within the BCP community has some "hands on" experience with this process.

Mapleflt wrote:A question for those far more "tech savvy" then I will ever be is there a device that can convert older 35mm slides to a digital medium and yes it's aviation related. I have a ton of my father's old film from his days on survey crews with a variety of airplanes; Lockheed Electra, Hudson's, Mosquito, Bell 47's, Hiller's mostly in the high eastern Canadian Arctic but also some down in South America.

I'm betting someone within the BCP community has some "hands on" experience with this process.

Yes, there’s a few ways to get this done. Do a google search for scanning slides to digital. I’ve used a high res scanner, which gets really tedious if you have many slides to scan.

There are many commercial companies that scan for you. Only down side is you have to let those slides out of your possession. That said, if I were to do it again, I’d send them off. Cheaper and easier.

MTV

My dad took all his 18mm (i think) film to Costco and they put it all onto DVDs. Stuff from the 70s when they were homesteading the farm, old family vacations, and even his wedding. They are really cool keepsakes for me. I’m sure you could do it yourself, but as Mike suggests, I’d take it to a photography shop or something and have them do it. It was surprisingly reasonable when my dad had his done.

A1Skinner wrote:My dad took all his 18mm (i think) film to Costco and they put it all onto DVDs. Stuff from the 70s when they were homesteading the farm, old family vacations, and even his wedding. They are really cool keepsakes for me. I’m sure you could do it yourself, but as Mike suggests, I’d take it to a photography shop or something and have them do it. It was surprisingly reasonable when my dad had his done.

Unfortunately, Costco closed its photo processing departments a year or so back. I used our local one several times.

MTV

Maplefit,
Before you take your slides to a photo shop to have them scanned, check to see if there is any dust on them. My wife took several trays of slides in to a local guy here that had a business in his home converting slides and such to digital. He didn't check them first, just scanned them dust and all.

tcj wrote:Maplefit,
Before you take your slides to a photo shop to have them scanned, check to see if there is any dust on them. My wife took several trays of slides in to a local guy here that had a business in his home converting slides and such to digital. He didn't check them first, just scanned them dust and all.

Good point, there’s no shortage of that on the ones I have.

I have a slide scanner that I bought because my uncle has literally thousands of amazing slides he took and bartered for over a 40 year period. I'm talking Reno in the 70s, air to air in Vietnam, etc. Some extremely rare, one-off images. All cataloged and we still watch slide shows to this day when I visit him.

Scanning the slides is easy. For SURE you need to dust off every single image before scanning and you need to take the time to see that the scan matches your expectation from the slide. I can post process it (heavily if needed) but WYSIWYG applies.

I will someday spend many, many hours converting his work to digital. I'm too busy building/flying to do it now so I just enjoy the slide shows with him when I can.

About 15 years ago, I bought a Nikon LS-5000 (a dedicated 35 mm scanner) to scan a large number of slides (~1,000) my dad took, some dating from the late 1940's. Some of the oldest slides were taken on AnscoChrome file, which had a sort of pinkish tone. The software that came with the scanner had a number of features intended to restore faded colors, reduce scratches, or eliminate dust specs. For some slides it worked beautifully (including fixing the pinkish tone of the old AscoChrome), and for others, not so well in terms of "restoration".

If you have a big project you might look on Ebay or other sites for a used 35 mm scanner. I know Nikon made several models.

Warren

Some great intel thanks to the BCP community, much appreciated