Front Garden - 2005.

As always, I do love playing with gadgets and I have loads of 35 mm negatives which I ought to copy; our best wedding pictures were, I think, colour slides taken by The Old Man on his Ilford Sportsman (the official ones were cr*p) though there is a niggling doubt in my mind as I have looked at a few of his holiday pictures - and they are bl**dy awful.
 
I dug out the cheap scanner I bought for the purpose some years ago, only to find that the installation disk is missing, and Google failed to find a source for the drivers but did reveal that the machine is built around a web-cam which doesn't bode well. What I did find was a Youtube clip of a Heath Robinson method for producing far superior results; it's based on a tablet computer, two rolls of gaffer tape, a device for holding the film, a tripod and a camera (preferably with a macro lens). I may Blip the set-up or include it as one of my last 13 extras for the year.
 
This picture was originally taken on Kodacolor film in 2005; other pictures on the strip include the film crew for the making of the Tom Hanks film, The Da Vinci Code at the Chapel which date it quite accurately. Herself was going to retire as soon as she’d met the star himself but, twelve years on, she’s still a tour guide there. The main challenge here was getting the colour balance right on the negative; though some correction can be made after the inversion, it does seem to help getting it about right before. There is plenty of instruction on the interweb, but it tends to be a little confusing. I’m a little surprised at how well it’s turned out, the colours are better than I remember from prints, which used to fade badly unless they were stored in the dark, and it is quite sharp, but then you couldn’t sharpen or adjust the contrast at the printing stage with colour negatives. It's a pity about the picture content.
 
Both monochrome and colour slides should be far easier, but time will tell.

p.s. Thanks for the nice comments about the Skye Blips.