I am getting ready to participate in our neighborhood’s annual garage sale. It is a big event in the local area. It’s well publicized and people seem to come from everywhere. You have to be very careful coming and going to your home, because people and cars are everywhere on the neighborhood streets.
One of the items I was preparing to sell on eBay or include in my garage sale list was an old slide duplicator attachment made for a RCA video camera I had in the early 80s. I sold the camera many years ago in a previous garage sale. I had never really used the attachment, because the quality of the slides as recorded on the video tape was so poor it was not worth the effort. The technology was not ready for what I wanted to do. By the way, this attachment was for a video camera that recorded onto a standard VHS video tape, so you can imagine how bulky and heavy the camera was.
The attachment itself is an RCA Model FSA 036A Slide Adapter that originally cost $100. Mine looks brand new and is still in its original box with all of the packing material, included the plastic bags holding some of the accessories – some unopened. The kit includes the basic slide adapter itself, a filter, filter size adapters, and slide holders for 35 mm and at least 110 mm film strips as well as a slide holder.
In my garage sale preparation, I also ran across an unopened package of GAF Pana-Vue slides of the Palm Springs Aerial Tramway. Over the years they had deteriorated to the point where the image was almost pure red. At first I thought I would try to see what I could do with them in Photoshop Elements. But I quickly discovered they would not fit my 35 mm slide scanner. They were a bit too big, which probably explains why the package was never opened.
As I was getting the slide adapter ready for sale, I thought I would see if could be attached to my Canon XTi Rebel. Not only did it fit, I did not even have to use any of the filter size adapters that were part of the slide adapter kit. I also found that its slide holder was able to accommodate a slide slightly larger than the standard 35 mm size. With now preparation whatsoever, I attached the slide adapter to the Rebel, put in a tramway slide and, pointed the camera out the window, and took the picture. Some cropping/vignetting occurred. But it worked.
I now had a reasonable good copy of a badly damaged non-standard slide. I uploaded the picture to Photoshop Elements 6.0, and quickly found that not only was color gone, there were a lot of spots etc presumably caused by some sort of fungus, I guess. At any rate, I used Levels to bring back the color, the Healing Brush and Spot Healing Brush to fix the worst stains, and sharpened it a bit.
The result is shown below. This by no means is a good picture, but the improvement was dramatic.
Here is the XTi original.

It now looks like this.

There are four more pictures of the tram. Based on these results, I will try to salvage each of them. I have some old odd sized negatives that I might be able to do something similar to using the slide adapter. Needless to say, it will not be part of my garage sale items. In fact the slide adapters position in life has been raised from being stored on the shelf in the garage to now residing inside the house.
Until next time,
Don
PS Don’t hesitate to leave a comment. It seems that is the only way that I can tell if anyone has read the article.
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