Tang 5 Gang

Everybody has been asking me "how do you plan to scan all your slides into the website". And after looking around at the cost of various slide scanners and evaluating them concerning the quality that I decided I needed -- well, I thought I could lash something together following the same general strategy of Debe can showers, Debe can cook stoves and the like. So I offer my solution in hopes that others may be encouraged to do something like it, and then send me some of the digital captures of those old but fabulous Tanganyika pictures for this website.

In the picture, you can see a horizontal bamboo pole propped up on a file cabinet. Bamboo sends the right message, better than a plastic mop handle. In your design, the file cabinet need not be made from Debe can metal. Don't use the hollow of a coconut grater to support the pole, it rolls too much.

The pole extends out over the floor. A large piece of paper, which yesterday I lifted off the restaurant table of a nearby sports bar, is taped to the pole along one edge of the paper. Fastener clips are clamped to the bottom of the paper to weight it in such a way that it hangs relatively flat in the vertical dimension. The setup takes about 1 1/2 minutes.

Approximately 4 feet away, a slide projector, turned on and focused at the paper, projects the image I wish to copy.

I sit on the other side of the paper, taking that picture as projected through the paper with a digital point-and-shoot camera. I find the backside gives the best contrast. Oh yeah, you have to reverse the slide image left to right, but doesn't that always happen automatically by itself anyway?

The advantage of this rig over a formal slide scanner is that taking pictures with a regular point-and-shoot digital camera takes no time whatsoever as opposed to waiting two or three minutes for a decent scan of one slide from a professional scanner. Additionally a point-and-shoot camera does automatic white balance. And finally I can use the camera for cropping the frame by moving farther away or closer from the back of the screen to select whatever part or portion of the image that I want. I can put the slide projector into automatic mode with a time interval of about 30 seconds, to give me time to focus and crop, and then just sit there and snap away whatever I have collected to project.

I think George Cummins would approve.

I did upgrade the unit a little bit by replacing the restaurant table paper with a piece of regular vellum from an art store. The restaurant paper showed some fiber grains when you magnified the digital images. The vellum seems perfect and I hope the upgrade doesn't destroy the genuine botch up character of the rig too much.