My current “GASP”(*) rig:
- My old 450D. At least the whole setup up doesn’t hog my usual camera, and its 12Mpix seems to be plenty given the quality of the slides.
- The heart of the setup, a Kaiser Dia Duplikator. Comes with an integrated (but removable) close-up lens which I don’t trust much (single element) so I decided to got without it.
- Canon EF-S 60mm Macro. My first iteration used the Canon EF 50mm/1.8 with a macro ring but this lens has a big drawback: the front moves when focusing, so the slide holder moves with it, and the AF motor has to pull all that weight, and een if you use manual focus, you are putting some weight on a moving part. So I found a second hand 60mm macro with an internal focusing (€220). A minor problem with the internal focusing is that it zooms slightly while focusing but since the focus is normally always at the same distance the framing ends up being the same in all shots.
- The problem with the 60mm lens is that it is a bit longer than the 50mm the duplicator was designed for, so the tube should be lengthened. Which is done here with a series of step-up/step-down filter rings, that allowed me to get the length about right.
- The duplicator is illuminated with an Aputure MC light source that I use for many things. The announced CRI 96 isn’t too bad, and I can set the color temperature. In practice though I have set it to 4500K and use the camera with auto-white balance, given the color shift of the slides I’m not aiming for accuracy, just that things look OK.
- A bunch of Arca-Swiss plates & quick-release I have at hand, plus various screws and adapters from a kit I found on Amazon. A pair of zip ties keeps everything aligned. A side benefit is that I can put the whole thing on a tripod and it doesn’t take up table space.
- USB cable to a Linux PC with Entangle and Digikam. The live histogram in Entangle is fairly useful to check out exposure. If I want autofocus, I need to get out of Entangle live-preview before I take the shot, but it’s a relatively minor inconvenience (still a lot more practical than doing manual focus on each, which is necessary because the thin cardboard slide mounts don’t always put the film at the same distance).
On the software side, I wrote two scripts:
- One that defines two KDE “actions” that I can call from Dolphin’s right click menu to right images by just tweaking the EXIF orientation flag (no re-encoding is done).
- One that creates a number-holder slide in Entangle’s capture directory from the highest-numbered slide of the collection (otherwise Entangle restarts from 0).
Samples posted here: Family archives, Saint-Tropez, 1959, before it became too fashionable
This whole enterprise turns out to be a rabbit hole because I also had to clean & repair the slide projector, replace the plastic sleeves that had become sticky, etc… It is also fun to see the evolution of my father’s photographic technique!
(*) GASP: Genuine Arca-Swiss Porn.