JBobK

I have photographed some 2,000 slides with good results from my home made rig that uses a camera, a macro lens, a slide holder, and an illuminated white poster board as a light source.

The poster board is about about 8" square and mounted about 6" beyond the slide holder. Between the slide holder and the poster board are two 5000K CFL lamps, one on each side of the slide, each lamp in a reflector, facing the poster board. The reflectors are made from 220-degree sections of large metal food cans.

I have not noticed any light distribution problems. Brightness is high enough so a typical exposure is 120 ISO, 1/40th, and f6.8. Many of my Kodachrome slides require additional exposures with compensation when "the blinkies" appear.

Photographing each slide is quick and easy. Editing each photo takes longer. Another time-burner is determining the who-what-where-when data and then typing it into the EXIF fields.

The digitizing project has been very useful in filling my COVID-19 spare time.

dave.speeking Loc: Brooklyn OH

I use this setup but am not quite satisfied yet.
The two remote flashes are triggered by the camera flash.

burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

No, just notice the fact that they are relatively sharp in the download. They're random strangers. The scene was somewhere in Oregon.

Bluefish Loc: Berks County, PA

Right on burk.👍🏻

taxslave

I had good results Photo copying over 3000 slides with a carousel projector. I removed the main lens from the front and the condenser lens from underneath. Where the condenser lens was, I substituted some light diffusers. I used a 100 MM macro lens to get a 1 - 1 copy to prevent the need to crop the results. I set the camera to automatic exposure and auto focus. It worked good. Make sure to brush or blow your slides clean of any dust beforehand. Most of the slides turned out perfectly good. I am not sure if they would stand up to the scrutiny of blowing up to exhibition size but I was looking for archival. A little adjustment in post processing was needed on some. But with this system I was able to photograph a 140 slide tray in about 10 minutes.

John_F Loc: Minneapolis, MN

As a rough guide for setting brightness, consult the technical light data for natural brightnesses. What is cloudless direct sunlight for incidence and the reflectivity of the subject. This will ballpark ya.

Bigmike1 Loc: I am from Gaffney, S.C. but live in Utah.

I have an Epson V600 Photo scanner that does a great job of scanning both slides and negatives. Why go to a lot of trouble trying to photograph slides? I also have a slide copy tube that I can fit on my Nikon DSLR and point at the sun but it is time consuming and more trouble than I want to take. Actually I have two V600 scanners. My wife and son use the other one to scan photos for their family history research.

burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

In a word, why = sharpness.

I had a V600. Excellent for prints, quite decent for 645 and larger 120/220 formats, inconsistent results with 35mm and smaller. I bought an adjustable height film holder for 35mm negatives and unmounted transparencies, which helped, but it still didn’t satisfy me.

In my AV production days, I had several film duplication setups, so it was a simple leap of faith to use a similar setup for digitizing film.

kjfishman Loc: Fulton MO

I scanned most of my slides with a Plustec 35mm scanner and sold it and bought an Epson V500 because I could scan multiple sizes of negatives. Both came with good software to get best image possible.

lamiaceae Loc: San Luis Obispo County, CA

I have copied slides and b&w negatives with a light box and digital camera, as well as with a scanner, 35mm to 4x5 and have seen no issues with the light source. Obviously close to 5500K but the brightness and thus exposure time seem to have little effect. These tools are digital and seem to be linear, unlike film with exposure and reciprocity exposure and color shifts. If the scanner software or cameras' excellent exposure system misses the WB you and tweek it with PP software. If the slides' color and exposure seem good to begin with you can work with jpegs, otherwise use RAW or TIFFs.

taxslave

Big Mike 1 - because I can do 140 slides in under 10 minutes at 1 to 1. I’ve tried scanners and this was much quicker.

mhdt64 Loc: Tampa, FL

Have you tried searching for a Firewire to USB adapter so you can use your Nikon scanner?

therwol Loc: USA

Firewire and USB are not only different data transfer protocols, they require different hardware to work, either on the motherboard or through an expansion card. Those simple adapters you see on Amazon are not likely to work. Adding an expansion card to a desktop is usually no sweat. If you have an old laptop, it may have a PCMCIA slot into which you can place a Firewire adapter. Who wants to bother with that, considering how old the laptop might be? Don't waste that fine scanner. Buy a desktop (maybe you're using one now), add a firewire expansion card, and if the drivers don't work, install Vuescan. Vuescan has most of the legacy drivers built in.

aellman Loc: Boston MA

All good ideas. The OP can also hook a dimmer up to the LED light source.

burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

When using any discontinuous spectrum light source (fluorescent, flash, LED are likely examples), SOME frequencies of light (colors) will be missing or muted or accentuated falsely.

There are some important measures of light quality. CRI, or color rendering index, is based on the idea that Noon daylight (in Washington DC on a clear day which happens to be the Vernal Equinox) has a CRI of 100, and everything else is referenced to that. For years, it has been popular to say that a CRI of 90 or above is "good color quality illumination." But there is much more to it than that:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-CRI_LED_lighting

Sunlight and Incandescent sources have continuous spectrum output. Incandescent is heavily biased toward the red end, so it requires correction (white balancing). Solux 4700K is probably the best example of a good incandescent light source for color-accurate work.

LED sources show the most promise of approaching perfection, but there are really bad LEDs, and really good LEDs, and the price difference is enormous!

LEDs are most commonly deficient in reproducing saturated reds. In order to see this, you need the chart showing the 15 different colors used to measure CRI. MOST CRI values are averages of scores for tiles 1 through 8 on the chart. However, tile 9, Strong Red, is the problem child... Very few sources other than sunlight and incandescent do a great job with this color.

https://www.waveformlighting.com/tech/what-is-the-difference-between-cri-and-ra

It is now common for those in the video and motion picture industries to rate ALL 15 of the Rendering index scores separately when evaluating light sources. Because CRI is an average of Ri values for colors 1-8, it ignores huge parts of the spectrum. And because discontinuous sources are usually deficient or excessive at certain frequencies, a graph of the 15 Ri values is often the basis for choosing an accurate LED source.

That Strong Red is the ninth Ri, is a frustration, because MOST measures of CRI ignore it, and it is the most difficult color of light to generate with LED and fluorescent sources. Better lighting companies will break out R9 by itself in the rating, stating something like, CRI=95, R9=90.

Even electronic flash has missing frequencies, but they tend to be colors we don't notice as much.

Especially when duplicating color negatives and Kodachrome slides to digital, R9 is important.