Old Pictures

I’ve got a bunch of old pictures, slides and negatives sitting around that I’ve wanted to scan for a while. I was thinking of bringing the new scanner I bought over to the US, but I noticed that between a sale price and rebate and a promo coupon I had, I could get the same scanner for $50, so I bought another one. This also has the advantage that I get the whole set of English software and manuals for it.

I decided to try it out first with some pictures from our 1978 trip to the Soviet Union. These are all on 35mm slides, so I got my first experience using the ‘LightLid’ transparency adapter. While it can take a whole strip of negatives at once, it only has one slot for a slide, so each slide needs to be done individually which of course takes a while. Still, once I got the right settings, things have proceeded fairly smoothly. While not all of the slides have turned out great, I’m still getting a lot of really nice scans, especially considering that these have been sitting around for 27 years.

More to come, but here’s me and my sister on the back side of St Basil’s Cathedral in Moscow’s Red Square, August or September 1978:

And a closeup of the young tourists:

Please note that no amount of tweaking with the color correction could make our clothing look less hideous. I fear that they actually really looked like that.