From Calais to Broadway

Well, as you can see, I figured out how to digitize the latest batch of slides. The new device works pretty much like the old one -- it's basically a tube attached to the camera that holds the slide at a fixed distance from the lens, so I can hold it up to the light and photogaph the image. In fact, this one seems to work a little better than the last one. It uses my macro lens, whereas the last one attached directly to the camera body, and there's a light diffuser at the end to ensure that the light on the slide is even, without shadows.

And that's the result, above -- the Place d'Armes in Calais, France, circa 1970. On the right, at the edge of the frame, is a historic toy and souvenir shop called La Tour du Jouet, which was a pun on a medieval watchtower across the street, Tour du Guet. (Or so Google tells me!) Jouet means toy in French.

I think this picture, from 1974, is so funny. Don't those kids look like they've been beheaded? And they seem about that happy.

For fans of military hardware, here's a Blackburn B-101 Beverley C.1 heavy transport plane from World War II, appearing at an airshow in 1970. More on the plane here.

This isn't a great quality picture, but it's an example of a slide taken with 126 cartridge film, which I mentioned the other day. This film size was used in common cameras like the Instamatic and Magimatic.

That's a lot of snow!

And here's one of the 110 cartridge images. These pictures are impossibly small and I can't imagine they made very good slides, even when seen with a projector. This guy seems to be putting something in the back of a Reliant Robin, a lightweight three-wheeled car manufactured in England until 1981 (the slide is dated June 1980).

Remember I said I had numerous pictures of a woman leaning back into the wind on a hilltop? Here's one of them. There's no date on it, and I have no idea where it was taken.

"June 26, 1991: Mam, Waterperry Gardens."

A nice shot of construction near one of the feet of the Eiffel Tower, dated May 1965.

And finally, a fantastic view of Times Square, looking uptown on Broadway from about West 47th Street, dated April 1963. Behind the Castro Convertibles shop is the Latin Quarter nightclub, and behind that the Howard clothing store.

Across Broadway, at the left side of the image, we can see the Trans-Lux theater near 49th Street, and something closer featuring a silhouette of a woman on the sign. (Probably a burlesque house.) There's a guy wearing a sandwich board in the lower left corner, but I can't read it.

Here's what that area looks like now -- unrecognizable!

So that's a sample of some of the slides I've found. After I've scanned the rest of the good ones I'll put them online in their own Flickr album and link it here, so you can look through them too!