About PastPhoto

Past photo started when I was at the Peculiarium in Portland, Oregon. Besides the cool stuff they had on display, they also had a bowl full of slides next to the cash register.

I started going through some of the slides in the bowl trying to find things that might be interesting. I wasn;t looking for anything particular, just something cool. I found one slide that I thought was of a place in Budapest, Hungary that I had been to, Hősök tere, but it actually was something even stranger.

I had stumbled on a monument that was built by the Soviet accupiers of Berlin after World War II in what eventually became West Berlin after everything had been sorted out.

Another slide that I found was an old picture of the old Tempelhof airport from probably the '60s.

It was at this point that I really got hooked on the concept of bringing these old and abandoned photographs to life.

Getting slides

I started with the slides I have then started branching out and picking up boxes of slides wherever I could find them not even knowing what I was getting except a rough count of the slides. Sometimes only the weight of the slides.

They never really came well packed at all. Most arrived with some newspaper on the top of them. Some in a bag inside the box they shipped in.

Honestly, I'm surprised how well they managed to survive the transport. Usually you think of slides, or more broadly, photographic film as something super delicate. And film is sensitive. But it's also something that is a bit overstated. Even after sitting around for, in some cases, 70 years, in questionable conditions, then being shipped in horrible packaging, they are still in reasonably good shape.

And we need to talk about Kodachrome at this point as well. The Kodachrome slides look as good now as they have looked ever. They don't fade because of how they were made. But this deserves a way more detailed writeup.

Building the rig

I went through many itterations of my scanner rig. At first I wanted to make it almost fully automated where I could just drop in a tray of slides. I spent months on this effort before I realized that this was something that I don't actually need to do.

When I started the slide scanning project I had accumulated around 20,000 slides. I was trying to come up with an automated scanning system. When I did the math, I realized that if I were scanning only six slides a minute it would take me less tha 60 hours or work to scan them all. That seems like a lot of time, but when I was started working out how much time I was spending trying to automate things it the cost-benefit really wasn't there at all. Cutting the scanning time down to 10-20 hours and spending a 100-200 hours designing the system was not at all worth it.

So I decided on a semi-automated system. Instead of having an auto-feeding system, I would be the feed system. This also allowed me to use my air compressor and dust off each slide as I was scanning this.

Scanning?

I have a dedicated slide and negative scanner that does a great job of scanning things at super high resolution. The problem is that it is slow; it takes the better part of a minute to scan a single slide. I need something much faster than that.

Taking a trip back memory lane I decided to make a copy-stand system based around my Canon 5DmkII camera and a macro lens. This would be set up in a custom-build enclosure with the rotary slide carrier that I 3D printed. Running the show was an Arduino that was controlling both the shutter of the camera through the remote release cable I hacked together as well as the custom 3D printed backlight system. Oh, and there's also a couple of cameras that take images of the slide mounts themselves. The Arduino controls the lighting and sequencing of these cameras as well.

I felt it was super important to capture the mounts as well as the primary image that's on the slide. Unlike negatives you have the mount that you can scribble things onto. Around 1/3 of my slides have markings on them indicating some context about the image. Even more is the handwriting that on the slides -- it's the literal mark of the maker. This is something I need to capture to tell the whole story as best as I can.