Hi, Scott -
First, thank you for all the info and links sent back-channel. Much appreciated!
Which year is your sixtieth? We Fossils will have to start planning ahead for your initiation, as I want to go to New Zealand for a while after I retire next year and will have to schedule my trip accordingly.
I was out at Fillmore earlier today, tinkering with 10-ton Porter #1, 'The Sespe'. But it IS a holiday weekend, and we'll be running on the 4th. My daughter is home from college for a few days, and asked to come along tomorrow, when it's my turn to fire up the engine. She's not a fossil, but definitely has a trace of foamer blood in her veins. (A Foamette?) First time in weeks the scanner will be cold for three days in a row!
Speaking of scanners: since you mentioned dealing with older slides, see my post of a few days ago at:
[www.ngdiscussion.net]
One of the reasons I had put off doing anything with my slides for so long was the difficulty in getting good scans. I sure couldn't affort to have the local custom lab drum-scan everything, and the results of the half-dozen that I did have done of my most favorite shots a few years ago were pretty disappointing. With the "grain correction", "fading correction" and "backlight correction" settings on my new scanner ("none", "low", "medium" and "high" options for each), I am getting much better results - even with some shots I had previously thought were hopeless. If you haven't invested in a scanner for a while, I highly recommend the Canon CanoScan 9950F. At about $400, it's worth every penny. That's what I used on all of my own shots that are on the 483 websites - see ss-2.htm, especially. The shots are a bit fuzzy 'cause there are so many that I had to shrink them quite a bit to avoid exceeding the space alloted by my ISP, but you can still tell there's pretty good shadow detail in most of them.
Thanks again for the link to your website - I'll be checking it out in detail right after the holidays!
- Russ
