ROMA 1
Original Slides From Kodak Negative Film
Ciao! This week, we’re digging through this old box of souvenir slides from the great city of Rome, Italy. From the light research I’ve managed to do, it appears my set of slides was sold in the mid 80s, though most of the photos were taken in the early 70s. There’s several releases of this set, the earliest I can find dates back to 1972, while the latest was available sometime in the 90s. From what I can tell, the photos stayed mostly the same throughout the time these were sold in souvenir shops.
I’ve been interested in putting this Ward’s / Smith Victor SS-1 Slide Sorter from the 70s to some use after picking it up last year at a Habitat Re:Store for a literal single dollar, and it was a joy to use.
The inside of the lid houses a frosted piece of flexible plastic with shelves to display three rows of slides on, as well as a removable inner tray to hold around 80 slides in total. towards the back of the metal box, theres an incandescent bulb which can be plugged in that shines through the frosted plastic to make each slide on the shelves viewable. The whole inside of the box is lined with off-white paper to help even out the light as it shines through.
As for the scanning process, I did a typical “DSLR” style set up. I knew from viewing these slides previously on a slide projector that they weren’t particularly detailed reproductions of the original images, and I was aware that they were very (very) dusty, so I wasn’t aiming to scan these in at 100+ megapixels or anything.
I used a high CRI, 3-way bulb and a dual layer of frosted plastic to light the slides. I then used a tripod and a level to get my Olympus OM-D E-M5 MKII about 7 inches away from the top of the slides. Here I used a Nikon 55mm f/3.5 Micro-NIKKOR AI lens, which is a compact macro lens. I stopped down to f/8 and rolled through all these slides in about half an hour.
I have since discovered there is a second set of slides from this set out there in the world, which I do plan on getting ahold of. There’s some really stunning photographs in this set, and since I’ve never been to Rome (and certainly never traveled there in the 1970s), it was really interesting to see some beautiful old photos from an even older city.
This set, sadly, isn’t quite complete. I’m missing Slides #41 and #43. Maybe when I pick up the second set, I’ll grab a lot with both editions and I can add those to this set in the future. I’ve transcribed the english line of information from the back of each slide so you have an idea of what you’re looking at as you sort through these. Well, that’s about it. Enjoy the photos!
Well, that’s it for this week! I hope you enjoyed the photos! If you’re looking for found media, please check out my page on Archive.org for the full list of digitized media. If you have any questions, feel free to send me a message right here or drop a comment below. If you haven’t already, please check out the suggested posts below! or any of my other previous posts here. Thanks so much for checking out this week’s edition of Diptych!
See you soon!
—Forrest
A European Vacation #3
This week I have for y’all a quick 7.5 hour trip across many of the most popular places in Western Europe, so I hope you brought a snack and some good walking shoes. First off, we will wind our way down the Rhine River, stopping in Germany and Switzerland, then over to France for a long stay in the capital, next we will hop on a train to Italy for awhile, then return to Switzerland to explore some more, finally it’s off to Ireland and Scotland for the remainder of the trip.
A European Vacation #2
Back in late July, I published my first installment of the Virtual European Vacation, and ever since I’ve been saving all the tapes that would fit that category for another article. Well, I recently picked up “Discovering Scotland”, and thought it might be a good time to look through what I’ve collected so far, and to my surprise there was…. um too many tapes!
A European Vacation
This week, before I go on a little vacation myself, I’ve got a little vacation you can take, right from the comfort of your own DXRacer NO1 Gaming Chair! For all my paid subscribers: my monthly subscriber-only email will be sent out within the first week of August, as I will be away from my computer and phone these last couple weeks of July. And for all my readers, to make up for the lack of articles this month, I’ve made sure that August is possibly the most packed month of the entire year.
SO PRETTY!
Oh wow these are beautiful. What a find