Friday Challenge

Harriet set me a challenge on Friday.  No, not going to Waitrose in order to buy some dinner (although this was on the list too), but to copy some archive pictures relating to two expeditions to "Girton Peak" in North East Greenland.  The first was in 1963, when a group of intrepid explorers named the Peak after the College; and the second was a return visit to the Peak in the 1990s by members of the College.  2019 is Girton's 150th anniversary, and Dr Fiona Cooke (a member of the second expedition) will be presenting a talk on 30th June as part of the Girton 150 Festival - hence the need for digital copies of the images.

The earlier images came in the form of faded, half-toned prints in a contemporary type-written report, with the rest being on 35mm transparencies (remember those?).  Since I expected the slides to be more straightforward than the prints, I decided to tackle them first.  How wrong could I be?  Plan A was to use an old-fashioned lightbox, but the fluorescent tubes it contained interfered badly with the digital sensor.  Plan B was to use my iPad as a "digital lightbox", and this was a great idea in principle.  The only downside was that the Fujinon 80/2.8 macro lens is so bleeping sharp that it was capable resolving the individual RGB pixels on the iPad's Retina screen.  Clearly I needed to separate the slide from the light source, and a couple of old-fashioned slide box lids proved ideal for this.  Necessity is the mother of invention, after all.

Note the use of an item which is essential in any photographer's toolbox: beer!

For reference, this is what happened when I laid the slide directly on the iPad "lightbox".  At full size there are horrendous Moiré patterns caused by sampling interference between the camera and iPad; zooming in clearly shows the RGB pixels from which the high dot-pitch Retina screen is constructed.

The final scanned slide, showing Fiona Cooke, along with another from the set.

The prints were relatively straightforward to copy in comparison to the slides, once I'd worked out a way of holding the report flat without destroying the 56-year-old document (who knew that kebab skewers would turn out to be so useful?).