Revisiting the past

It seems appropriate that the New Year finds me revisiting the past. Triggered by the flood of Antarctic photos posted recently by Michael Reichmann and some of his co-travellers, I have had another attempt at salvaging something from my extensive slide collection from Antarctica which I took in 1988 and 1992. At the time of these visits, I had absolutely no intent beyond personal mementoes for these photos. I had very little idea of what I was doing, despite endless, patient advice from people such as Rick Frolich and Julian Paren, and my equipment was basic: Canon FT, with a few Canon lenses (pretty good f1.4 50mm, a 28mm, and a Vivitar zoom, along with a fish eye add-on), all borrowed from my father, and an Olympus XA compact. The second time, I think I had a second Canon body, an FTb, but I'm not so sure now. I took my colleagues advice and used mainly Kodachrome 25 & 64, with a few rolls of Ektachrome 64. I had little idea of what a tripod would be used for. On top of this, I did not take good care of the slides, and many are damaged by fungus, dust and scratches. Of course at that time, the only practical things you could do with slides was to project them, and to get Cibachrome prints made. The idea of scanning them into a computer and manipulating the results would have been pure science fiction. As far as I was concerned, at that time computers lived in big rooms and were used for science. Small computers, primitive PCs, pre-Windows IBMs, Commodores, BBC Micros and the like were useful for recording data and writing short reports...but image processing ? No way! On the second trip we did in fact have a number of Macs with us, including a Mac II and a Portable, and probably we had Photoshop 2.5 lurking somewhere, but this was used for science, not photography. My interest was revived around about 1998, when I started getting more into photography as a goal in itself, and when I bought my first film scanner, a Minolta Scan Dual. At that time I had little computer power, although of course I had far more than in 1988. Scanning slides into Photoshop 3.0 was pretty disappointing: at 2400dpi, with no dust & scratch removal, no colour management, no real idea about editing, there was little to be done. However, the results from that time are actually still on the web, in an orphaned, unmanaged web site at Easynet. Later, some 3 or 4 years ago, I had another go at salvaging a few slides. It was a bit more successful, but still not totally satisfying. However, in recent months, both some positive comments on a few slides, and the realisation that I should make the most of what I've got have combined to make me decide there was still some mileage in these slides. The Luminous Landscape reports were the final push, since apart from anything they helped me to realise that short of a miracle I'm never going there again - tourist trips are strictly in high earner territory. Now, with the improved scanning performance from my Minolta Scan Multi Pro, 16x multisampling, and wide gamut colour space, I'm getting better source material (although the dynamic range still doesn't quite cope with some Kodachromes - black & white penguins against white snow are pretty challenging). Using the Scanhancer also helps a lot, especially as it enables Digital ICE to work on Kodachromes. The way in which some fungal damage is cleared by this combination is little short of miraculous. Noise Ninja is great for reducing film grain and scanning noise, and the grey balancers in PhotoKit Colour are very useful shortcuts (although their effect can be replicated with curves). The vignetting tool in Photoshop CS2 is also extremely useful. Possibly I have acquired slightly better composition skills, which help me to make better crops. Another very useful new tool comes from Joseph Holmes's Chrome colour profiles. These allow saturation to be adjusted in a completely non-destructive way, by assigning variations of his wide gamut colour space, and are very well suited to Kodachrome. There is also a strange pleasure in rediscovering the neutrality and ambience of Kodachrome. Makes me want to go out and buy some more while I still can.

Before...

...and After

The British research ship RRS John Biscoe near Damoy hut.