Slide scanning

Well, the new scanner is working great, I've got a good start on scanning slides.

I've found one thing out so far. My mom thought the Argus C3 was a great camera. I'm here to tell you, it stunk. It stunk on ice. The big problem is possibly operator error but could be a misaligned focusing mechanism; every single shot taken with it (about 10 years worth) were backfocused by about 5 feet for portraits; the subject is blurry, stuff 10 feet behind is sharp.

The other problem is that the thing must have a completely spherical lens. The distortion away from the center of the fram is abysmal.
( Here's an example behind the cut )

( ICE dust/scratch removal demo behind cut )

These slides were stored in a damp basement and have a LOT of little mold or some kind of organic looking snowflake type things sitting on the emulsion. It is possible to clean them but it's very time consuming. All I'm doing on the first pass is to lightly brush off loose gunk with a Q-tip.

My plan for now is, first pass: anything with people in it, skip landscape unless it's clearly a family home or a regular vacation spot which gives context to other stuff.
Second pass: Identify, clean and rescan particularly good images.

Ugh, eyes tired

I was cleaning half the day, then I checked the Myth box, realized it was out of drive space again, and decided to finally do something about it. So I spent about 5 hours archiving old Brainiac episodes; there were some on there from last June. Anyway, they're all cleaned out now. I thought I had watched them all but I found a half dozen new ones.
Anyway, that should keep it happy for a few days.

I ordered a 750GB drive yesterday; they were on sale for $140 over at Newegg. I'm going to put it in the Myth box as an MP3 and photo repository. I have a 250G over there now but it's down to 50G free and it only has my photos and MP3s on it, nobody else's. I figure with 750 we can all consolidate our files. Then I can back them up easier. Right now I don't think there are any backups for a lot of our music other than "rip them again from CD" - and in a lot of cases the CDs aren't around anymore for various reasons.

I was going to buy two 750s and an external case, to facilitate backups, but I didn't feel up to blowing $300+ when I just spent $200 on a new scanner and I've blown another $200 on various stuff in the last few weeks. I'm trying to get my card balance DOWN every month.