Ball, Bike and Dog

This image of sailors didn't come from a slide, but it was included in that bag of stuff from the slide dealer. There's always a fair amount of detritus in these bags, including (in this case) several old photo negatives -- big things, measuring a couple of inches across. I'm not sure what kind of camera they're from, but they're not 35mm.

I set the negatives aside, thinking I'd scan them, and yesterday I tried. But the scanner doesn't have a source of light from the back, so the scans just looked like black squares. Not very useful. (I think I've made that mistake before with my own negatives, actually.)

So instead I hung them in the dining room window, backed by the white wintry sky, and took pictures of them with my Canon. I then put those pictures into Lightroom, turned them from negative to positive (which is easily done by flipping the tone curve) and adjusted the contrast. Et voila! Sailors!

Here are some more:

I think those are all the same boy, who is probably related to the guy on the beach with the kid on his back. They're good-quality pictures. Someone knew their way around a camera.

This bag of slides is also interesting because of the many formats I'm encountering.

Here's a sample. At the top right is a normal 35mm slide, the most common kind. Left of that is what I believe to be a 110 film slide, dated 1980. Apparently you could get slide film for both 110 and 126 cartridge cameras -- I never realized that. (There are some 126 slides in this bag as well -- they're square and not very good quality, just like 126 pictures on paper!)

Below that is a stereoscopic slide, designed to be viewed in a stereoscope for 3-D effect. (I would love to know what that looks like, but I'm not buying a stereoscope to find out!) Apparently they can be professionally scanned somehow, but I'll just scan one side and leave it at that. "Vivienne" is in black and white, wearing a sweater and admiring an amaryllis.

And finally, at lower right is one of the negatives from the photos above -- just so you can see how big they are.

Lots of weird stuff in photo world!