We completed a project to scan a large collection of 35mm slides for the MIT Museum in Cambridge, MA. These slides were copies of Harold Edgerton’s groundbreaking work in high speed and high-powered flash photography. Much of the original work was on medium and large format films. The University had these originals duplicated to 35mm slides some time ago. We scanned these slides for the Museum to use on the website and as “first versions” of the images for prints and licensing.

We all know Edgerton’s most famous work – milk splashing and balloons bursting. But this project gave us a look at the rest of his photography work – from utilitarian (e.g., night reconnoissance shots during WWII), academic (e.g., Schlieren photos of smoke and flame) and whimsical (e.g., fruit being destroyed by bullets).

Many of the scanned 35mm slide images are available on the Edgerton Collection website. It is well worth the time to look at some of this amazing work: Edgerton Collection

It is wonderful to help out a non-profit arts organization, and learn a bit about a new area at the same time.

(Photo Courtesy of Tile Heritage Foundation)

Over the last year we have scanned a very large collection of 35mm and 126 format negatives for the Watkins Photo Archive. Howard K. Watkins is a prolific shooter who captured a good deal of the social and political life during the 1970’s and 1980’s. This collection includes many images of politicians, entertainers, athletes, and life in the Fresno, CA area.

If you were active in the Fresno area over the last 30 years, Howard is looking for help in identifying all of the people and places in his shots. Please check out the website for details or to support this work.

(Header image courtesy of Howard K. Watkins.)

I’m a bit late to the party in publicizing this, but I found it interesting: Daimler is funding a scanning project of the photographs of Zoltan Glass. This would be a fun project to work on (unfortunately, we are not).

If you are a historic car buff, then this is for you. Daimler scanning project.

I had a very painful trip to the Midwest on United Airlines. I wish that it was possible for the airlines to simply go out of business and start again. I realize that this won’t happen, but it is really what is needed to fix things so that travel is sane again.

On the Pixmonix front, we added a couple of new services during the last month. Like photo scanning, we have been offering these services “informally” for years. We now offer DVD slide show creation services and photo restoration services.

On the page about our photo restoration service, you can see some wonderful images that we restored for a book project. It was a real privilege to be involved in this work. The gentleman involved had some wonderful stories to tell and some great photos to show us of Afghanistan in the late 40’s. Our customer provided text for the book. We helped on the project with scanning and photo restoration (some of it rather extensive), as well as book layout, proofing, and procurement. The final result is really wonderful. Thanks Charles!

Short summary: this thing is not worth the packaging it ships in.

Prior to formally launching this service, we investigated using a high-speed scanning system like those from Kodak. We were quite disappointed with the quality of the scans from these high speed scanners. The folks at Kodak really were no help in convincing us that they could do better and insisted that their scanners delivered comparable quality and met their quoted scanning resolution, even when we were holding evidence to the contrary. Quite disappointing… and another missed opportunity for Kodak. We have some samples from these high-speed scanners compared to those from our high end flatbed scanners on our website.

In short, the high speed scanners fell short for sharpness and color quality. They compared very poorly with the flatbed scans, even when we compared 600 PPI scans from the Kodak scanners with 300 PPI scans from our flatbeds.

We know that some of our competitors are using this technology to offer very low priced scans. Some are even proud of their use of these techniques – in part, I’m sure, because Kodak gives them some free advertising and high quality web links from the Kodak site. Buyer beware! Sometimes you do get what you pay for.

I would like to see the robot that can turn the pages of the book that fast!