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

When you’re doing a video to DVD or film to DVD transfer, you are likely going to be able to fit in more than one of your original films or tapes onto the DVD because the DVD can store about 2 hours of video. Almost all 8mm and 16mm films are much shorter and many video tapes are shorter, too. To make it easy to navigate so that you can easily find the clip you are looking for when you decide to watch your old movies, you should include chapter breaks on the DVD at the start of each film or clip that you have transferred to the disk.

When doing video to DVD film transfer, if you have shorter films, especially the length of old 8mm films, then you are going to have a real need to insert chapter breaks into your DVD menus. Otherwise, every time you watch your DVD you are going to either have to watch the entire movie in sequence or you are going to have to manually fast forward through the film until you find the spot that you want. Most of the time when we watch a home movie, we aren’t interested in watching a long presentation. Instead, we’re more interested in showing a specific clip to friends or relatives; something that makes a few of these chapter break markers important.

If you want to put in a chapter break when doing video to DVD film transfer, you’re going to need DVD authoring software. There are different approaches to this that range from easy to use but limited programs like iMovie and iDVD on the Macintosh, to programs that are more professional, such as Adobe Premier. A DVD authoring program will not only allow you to put chapter markers into your DVDs so that you can navigate them easily, but it will also allow you to build in full menus like you see on commercial DVDs. You will also be able to do things like customize backgrounds for the menus and name the chapters for easier navigation.

When we transfer your film to DVD or video to DVD, we can add chapter breaks to the resulting DVDs. Please ask if you would like more information on this great addition to the basic transfer of your memories to DVD.

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)

We often find that people scanning Kodachrome slides are unhappy with the cool cast of many of these slides, and with some of the more muted (if not more realistic) colors. We can warm these slides and boost saturation easily enough, but is it still Kodachrome? Have we violated the integrity of the images? Some in the archival sciences would say that doing so is a major harm here. However, for most of our customers, we aren’t doing work that is truly “archival” in the academic sense. Rather, we are preserving the memories in the slides. With this in mind, removing color casts and pulling details out of shadows is in line with our mission. What do you think?

A View to Hugh, the blog that goes along with the digitization effort at UNC is an interesting read, well worth a visit. Thanks to Stephen and his colleague Elizabeth Hull for the informative writing.

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.)

To add to the information that we have on the website about color management (including a review of Fraser’s Color Management book), we have added a book review of Color Management in Digital Photography by Brad Hinkel. This is a great book for people new to color management.

I think that this is a typical response to disruptive innovation. “It will only work for low-end applications.” “It’s too expensive.” “It doesn’t perform as well as my current XXX.” All true. All completely missing the point.

The second article in the print Spectrum, Zink: A Modern Fairy Tale,  (online title is “Zink: Inkless Printing With Colorless Color”) was a bit more even handed in its treatment of Zink and their product plans. It also gave a much more detailed view of how the technology works and what it takes to bring a technology to life after the death of the parent corporation.

The technology itself is very clever. Paper is permeated with three chemicals that are uncolored initially. However, when they are heated, the change colors to produce yellow, magenta, and cyan colors, respectively. The trick is that the chemicals change color at different temperatures and with different heating times. A very clever design in the print head and controlling electronics (along with these magic chemicals) applies the right temperatures for the right amount of time to get the colors to mix properly to form full color images. Interestingly, they don’t use a black chemical – analogous to the black inks in most ink jet printers. Perhaps they can produce satisfactory blacks by using the CMY colors. In an inkjet printer this may be too expensive (in terms of ink used) or produce poor results (too much ink required to do it precisely without bleed to adjacent pixels?). This is an amazing piece of research and engineering.

I haven’t seen any sample prints from these printers.

So… if Zink has their way there will be no more ink to buy for our printers. But you will need to buy this special (patented, and presumable not cheap) paper. Hmmm. I think that I would rather buy ink, even though it is a pain and it is expensive. At least I can choose my paper form, format, texture, etc. without needing to have support from a single paper manufacturer. And… I can use generic ink, even though it is a big pain a lot of the time. ]]> http://www.pixmonix.com/blog/polaroid-2-0-and-3-0-zink-printer-technologies/feed 0 http://www.pixmonix.com/blog/digitizing-zoltan-glass-photos-at-daimler http://www.pixmonix.com/blog/digitizing-zoltan-glass-photos-at-daimler#comments Fri, 04 Dec 2009 05:25:00 +0000 sbennett http://www.pixmonix.com/frb/blog/?p=35

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.