Railroad Forums 

  • Copying Old RR Photo Collections

  • Discussion of photography and videography techniques, equipment and technology, and links to personal railroad-related photo galleries.
Discussion of photography and videography techniques, equipment and technology, and links to personal railroad-related photo galleries.

Moderators: nomis, keeper1616

 #603548  by fordhamroad
 
-not experienced with this, seeking some advice:
-I have some friends with boxes of old b+w 8x10 prints. Would like to organize an effort to copy and preserve these on digital media. I would like to give some copies to museums or libraries. An archivist friend suggests that 600 dpp TIFF would provide decent copies which could be used for future prints, possible publication, or a basis which could be scaled down for web use.
-it would be quite expensive to send all these prints out to a commercial source, and I would prefer to copy them on location in peoples's homes, or at some convenient location.
-what sort of equipment currently available could I purchase which would alow me to travel to a location such as a home or library, and scan high quality pictures? There is a lot of good historical material out there which will probably be lost when some of the friends pass on and the stuff goes in a dumpster. In most cases, the photographers have long since gone and original negatives irretrievably lost.
-would greatly appreciate any recommendations or suggestions

Thanks

Roger
 #604058  by MEC407
 
If you only need to scan prints -- no slides, no negatives, no other types of film -- then a laptop and a flatbed scanner would be the ideal solution for what you're describing.

There are some flatbed scanners that come with so-called "film adapters" or "transparency adapters" -- however, these usually only work well with medium format or large format film/transparencies; the results you get from scanning 35mm film with these things is usually only suitable for e-mail or the web, not printing or archival use.

To properly scan 35mm negatives and slides, you need a dedicated film scanner. These are still relatively portable, although they're usually heavier than a flatbed, and are a bit slower and a bit more difficult to operate.
 #616116  by Otto Vondrak
 
Any good consumer-grade flatbed scanner can produce a 600dpi grayscale scan from a flat 8x10 print. Make sure you actually save it as grayscale, nothing more annoying than a 600dpi RGB (color) file of a grayscale image. What's more, they're three times the size they need to be. Black and white images should be saved in grayscale, color images in color.

Slides and negatives should be sent to a lab to be professionally scanned and burned to CD-ROM.

-otto-