In the Smith’s dining room, stacked against a bookshelf, there are three feet of slide reels which Greg explained that he had inherited from his family. Sitting on top of them was a slide duplicator and viewer from the 70’s. The duplicator is little more that a lens-mount tube with 2:1 zoom marks and a slide-plate. The plate is able to hold a slide, has a diffusion glass in the back of it, and there’s a space behind the slide holder for something. It could be for a slide tray as it has spring-clips to hold it in place but I’m clueless as to what it is for. Being a Canoneer, Greg had not found a way to use it with it’s Nikon mount. I was able to put it on my D7000 and Greg suggested that I could just put my flash behind the plate to light it. I set my camera on commander and my flash on remote. That did pretty well. But even zoomed all the way out, I wasn’t getting all the slide. Ah, that DSLR crop factor. After a few attempts, we stopped for the night. I found myself still intrigued the next morning so I started googling. The second hit was a blog from someone in exactly the same straits. His solution to the crop-factor dilemma was to fully create his own slide converter using his 1:1 macro. I could do that. I set up Greg’s tripod and mounted my Sigma 105mm Macro to my camera and pointed it straight down. I put my flash on a stool under it and pointed it straight up. Then I set the slide plate on top of the flash. It was just a matter of adjusting the height of the tripod and the focus to make it work. I found that the only adjustment that I needed post set-up was to the exposure compensation as some slides were extra dark (up to +2.0) and some were extra bright (down to -5.0). I went through three boxes of slides in just a couple of hours. Greg knows who some or most of these people are; I do not. The slides were processed in ’61 and ’67 from the dates that were printed on them. The one submarine says ‘batfish’ and the submarine trailer says ‘USS Sooner’. The Texas School Book Repository is from ’67. The castle, the city and the rest, if you have an idea, share it. (Who was ‘Chemical Kelley’?) Slides were chosen for their composition and artistic value only.
