I wrote a post last week about an amazing set of 35mm slides I managed to pick up which showed various views about Scotland taken in 1967. Well, I've looked at the slides in more detail now, and found they contain some really good quality pictures from many parts of that country, and I've included another set here which show some great views of Dunbar harbour.
At the time I wrote my post last week, I'd been through all the slides in the box and scanned them all on auto settings quickly just to get an idea of the contents. It turns out there are several views of landscapes and general scenery which, although good quality, are very similar so I won't be adding them to the article section of found-film - they will go into the image database. I did however find several collections of images which depict towns or activities which are interesting enough to feature as an article.
This set is one such collection and shows the harbour in Dunbar, the life boat and the ruined castle on the coast just outside the harbour. Although it's great to see these images from 1967, it's also interesting to see how little the harbour has changed if these pictures are compared to some modern pictures of the same area.
To get a good scan, each of these slides was removed from it's mount and the glass thoroughly cleaned to remove the years of grime. The actual film images themselves didn't need any cleaning, I simply used a bulb puffer to make sure there was no dust on them and refitted them back in their housings. As I cleaned each one I confirmed, as I suspected from my initial assessment, that these were all taken on Kodak film.
Once the slides had been cleaned I scanned them on an Epson V550 Perfection flat bed scanner using SilverFast 8 scanning software. Each slide was scanned at a resolution to give a file size of about 7M and imported into Lightroom for a bit of colour correction and exposure balance.
Views of Dunbar harbour
So these are the images I scanned from the slides. I think they show real quality and fantastic colour considering they were taken 50 years ago. There are a few blemishes on the pictures which are probably down to dirt, but I don't think it's worth trying to clean images which are this good just to get a small reduction in blemishes. It's also true that having perfect images is in many ways a modern phenomena - when we took all our pictures on film we were used to a few imperfections, so these actually just look more authentic!
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