Depth of Field

Macro Photography

Slide Transfer with Nikon D90

My grandmother was an avid photographer and she left me 30 some trays of slides. The last time I pulled out the screen and projector the screen fell apart while trying to put it up. So I decided it was probably the time to digitize the works. I bought a SmartScan 3600 and wasn't very happy with the scans and it sits on my desk collecting dust. I have tried to shoot them with my Fujifilm Finepix 4900zoom and S7000 because of their fantastic macro settings, but they came out with a lot of lens correction problems. I was going thru a bunch of my old videographer equipment stuff way back in the attic and found a slide and neg conversion kit for my long gone JVC video camera. So I started experimenting and got the Kenko Extension Tubes.

So I stuck the 20mm extension tube on my Nikon D90 with the Nikkor 50mm 1.8f lens and with a 52mm-58mm adapter ring from my old Yashica FX2 and then put on the JVC video DP adapter DP-C70U slide conversion tube. To light this I found a sweet spot on my light box and just place the front of this vertically on the lit box making sure I use the floresent white balance setting on my camera.

I went to manual focus and started shooting and converting. Nice thing about this you pull them into lightroom and do all the playing. I plan on trying some HDR with these just to see if I can pull more out of the shadow areas of the slides that are possibly more detailed.

In my next blog I will post some of the converted images.