So, we visited Indrek’s parents some time ago and we came home with a bunch of diapositives. This stuff is just gold- pictures of Indrek’s fabulous childhood. Don’t worry, I’m going to share some of the good ones with you 🙂
But, let’s get to the point. How we transformed diapositives into JPGs ? I did this with my DSLR and another helpful widget was my new Canon EF-S 60mm f/2.8 Macro USM Lens. And we set up this funky system:
Maybe it doesn’t look like a professional set-up, but what’s most important-it worked well. Other helpful things were the good old retro diapositive projector and  its frame holder. We put the frame holder between two books and it was good enough. And to soften the projector light there is one A4 paper between the projector and the holder.
I chose following settings:
- AV mode
- ISO 100
- Aperture f11
I tested with different aperture settings, but f11 seemed most decent. It is important to set ISO to 100 (or 200) to avoid distracting noise on the pictures. And of course I shot RAW files. They’re uncompressed and contain a lot of information which makes it better for photo editing.
This whole thing wouldn’t have been possible without a tripod and a shutter release. I haven’t purchased a shutter release cable yet, instead I tethered my computer with my camera using Lightroom. Before doing so, I tried to push the shutter myself, but there was camera shake seen on the picture.
We had a pretty smooth workflow- I clicked the button in Lightroom, Indrek changed diapositives and the camera took care of all the rest. Yes, it’s that easy as it sounds 🙂 All the pictures were automatically transferred into Lightroom and I was able to quickly check if the focus was right.
The only annoying thing about whole process was cropping. But you just can’t skip this step. And some pictures needed a little bit of shadow lifting, highlight reducing and sharpening. These were the main tools I used.
Last thing to do was to export all files to my computer as JPGs and that’s about it !
And here are my favourite ones:
