Hi Karrera. My set-up comprises a copy stand, which supports the camera in a vertical position, together with a 100mm f2.8 L IS macro lens. While in use in this manner, I turn the lens image stabilising off. On the copy stand base board, I use a slide viewing box to illuminate the slide or negative from below. If your slides are mounted in frames, you could simply place them directly on the viewing box. However, most of my slides and negatives are unmounted, so I use the carrier from a Canon FS4000 film scanner, to hold them flat. If you do not have a copy stand, you could achieve the same result using a tripod. Whatever method you choose, it is important to ensure that the camera and slide viewing box are absolutely level, e.g. using a spirit level. With the camera set up and the slide or negative in place, I turn on the lights in the viewing box and then establish the required exposure using the camera's built-in meter. For this purpose, I set the camera to Manual mode and the ISO to 100. The lens aperture is usually set to f11 or f16. I do not know what the colour temperature of the lights in the viewing bow is, so I leave the camera on Automatic White Balance. With this set-up, my shutter speeds are usually around 1 second to 1.5 seconds. The room should ideally be darkened by drawing the curtains, otherwise the image could be affected by bright light falling on the surface of the slide or negative.
Just to digress for a moment, prior to the "digital age", I had a darkroom in which I could make colour and monochrome prints. I purchased the above-mentioned Canon FS4000 film scanner at a time when digital cameras were still very expensive, but the trend was nevertheless moving towards processing images in Adobe Photoshop, prior to printing them on ink-jet printers. I used the film scanner in high resolution mode to scan those images that I wanted to print. I also started working through my files of slides and negatives, creating low resolution JPEGs, to facilitate sorting and retrieval. Over the years, I have probably scanned about 25% of my images. Like a lot of people, scanning the rest remains one of those projects that "I should get around to some time".
Bearing in mind the fact that I already have a film scanner, you might wonder why I have also started scanning using a camera and a copy stand. The answer is due to the fact that, while the film scanner produces very high resolution images, it is rather slow and every spec of dust is also recorded, which requires a lot of post-processing. I am also conscious of the fact that this device is now 14 years old and may not last very much longer. If it should break down, I doubt if the Canon repair agents still hold spare parts for it and it will be declared un-repairable. I know that some of the flat bed scanners on the market now can be used to copy slides or negatives. I have one that can do this, but the resolution and quality do not match the film scanner. Bearing in mind that my darkroom was dismantled some years ago, I began to think that, if my film scanner should fail, I would have a problem if I wanted to print one of my negative or slide images.
While thinking that there should be another (easier? quicker?) way to copy images, I came across an article in the Luminous Landscape website entitled "Scannerless Digital Capture and Processing". Look under Articles / Techniques. Embedded in this article is a downloadable PDF document, which describes two ways of scanning images, one comprising the method I described above, while the other utilises a camera, a macro lens and a slide copying attachment, with the illumination provided by a flash. Realising that I had a slide viewing box similar to the one used in Mark's set-up shown in Fig.3 lying in the cupboard, I decided to give it a try. It seems to work quite well, although I am not sure if you could achieve copies good enough to produce large prints for commercial sale. As an "enthusiastic amateur", the results are good enough for my purposes. I suggest that you take a look at this article. In addition to the copy process, it also goes into a lot of detail about the post processing that is necessary after the image has been captured. My knowledge of Photoshop is not that good, so I have come up with my own simplified process, that does not involve as many steps as those described.
Regards, Tony.
