My guess is that Hollywood doesn’t need all these high paid people to make movies anymore. They don’t need the sound stages or expensive destinations. They will eventually make movies using AI for the story sources and CGI for all the actors. There will be no more actors making millions of dollars. In fact they won’t need Hollywood. Movies and TV entertainment will come from many sources. All those folks now on strike will have nothing to go on strike for.
Sad to see but I’m afraid it’s true.

Back in the 40s and 50s I remember Sylvania, the manufacture of flashbulbs had several pictures that were shown in Life Magazine. The one that I remember that was quite impressive was where many flashbulbs were setup on the Great Pyramid and then a picture made of the whole pyramid being lit up by these hundreds of flashbulbs.
I went looking for these pictures on the internet and couldn't find a single one.
I was wondering if anyone know the whereabouts of some of these old pictures? If they are on line please post a link that we could follow.

It’s been a long time since I fired up Photoshop, but at one time it had the tools to correct such distortion. At the cost of having an image with a strange pixel distribution. I corrected a fisheye image with it as an experiment and was quite impressed at the quality of the corrected image. This Photoshop tool even used the lens focal length to make the correction.

Just a thought. Multi layer materials sometimes have issues when the humidity varies. Perhaps your film is very dry and could use an increase in the ambient humidity. You didn’t say where you live but if you are in the Southwest consider letting them sit in a higher humidity environment for a day or two. Make sure the film is not rolled or stacked tightly. I don’t know an easy way to do this but maybe something like a plant terrarium could help.

But……you can get the app for your phone or tablet and ply it full time.

Thanks for that good idea. I will check it out.

I have a collection of Hi8 video tapes. My camera died many years ago so I am in the market for a camera or Hi8 tape deck I can use to play them back for digitizing. There are a few on Ebay but nothing that caught my eye. I would assume that whatever is offered it would also have the appropriate power supply. I have other family members in the same boat.
Thanks

What a great response to my questions. These replies should be merged into a single article and submitted (where, I don't know except here?) for others to read.
I will keep my existing equipment for now, but will certainly pursue a lighter system of some sort for the future. But thanks to you folks I feel much more educated.
I am a retired engineer, having worked in the electro-optics field for most of my life. As with most engineers I love technology and tend to sop up new devices and with the information received here I feel much more enlightened. I am a little trapped at home taking care of my wife after having several strokes. In addition many of my friends and co-workers are no longer with us. Being retired one loses that fellowship found in the people that you work with is gone. I always felt that I got to work with some of the most intelligent people on the planet, but this is a good replacement for those people.
Today's companies do a mediocre job of explaining their equipment so getting input from actual users helps tremendously.
Thanks again to all of you.

I would like some input regarding mirror-less cameras versus our old reliable DSLR friends. I am 81 and physically going slowly down hill. I own a D7000 and a D300E. My walk around lenses are an 18-300mm for the D7000 and a 28-300mm for the D800E. I have many other lenses but these are left on these cameras. As time goes on I am getting weaker and a little shakier. My main reason for personally moving to mirror-less is to end up with a capable system but much lighter than my present systems.
From what I can tell the weight issue is not a big one, the mirror-less system are still fairly heavy. The image stability is now in the camera and it functions by moving the focal plane rather than some element in the lenses. What about focusing? With the mirror-less system does one totally depend on the built in auto focus for all focusing, or can one focus using the LCD viewing screen, similarly to the penta-prism finder? Can you see the image well enough to focus sharply with it? Since the image stabilization is in the camera shouldn't all lenses now be much or at least somewhat less expensive? They don't appear to be cheaper. Now this could be due to the cost of developing a new line of lenses.
With just these features being a little different I don't see a big advantage moving to the mirror-less world over what I now own.
If some of you folks with mirror-less can give me some feedback I would greatly appreciate.
I often end up shooting in situations that only a DSLR could accommodate, such as shooting through a different optical system, i.e. telescopes, microscopes and really different optical situations.
If most of ones shooting is outside, how well does using an LCD screen work out for you. I have trouble using them in bright sunlight, i.e. my mobile phone. Hard to focus using the screen under these circumstances..

An interesting thing about this. If you have ever seen some of the old photographs of the hard hat workers when they were building the skyscrapers in NY. You know the ones where maybe 10 men were sitting on an iron beam hung from a crane. Some were eating lunch, others were just having a smoke. Well it turns out that some people, mainly Native Americans, are missing a brain chemical that takes away their fear of heights, entirely. Those were some of the first people to work on the high rise in NY. So I imagine that feature has been carried down through certain families. I'll bet these fellows are missing that chemical. Just watching it causes puckering for me.
We have a Psychiatrist in the family.

I will have to check. PS 6 is installed on an old Win 7 computer that is little used these days. I keep it running for the many programs that I might use that are not supported by Win 10. This has become a very irritating issue with me. I keep hoping that someday a third computer operating system will be born that will support these older programs. I have no experience with Linux but I'm pretty sure it won't run Windows software. Maybe someone can correct me on this.

I am a retired engineer from the electro optics business. When I got into engineering in the early 60s, HP was premier company that made electronic test equipment. Then a lady, Carly Fiorina, took over the company and split it into two parts. One was called Agilent which I believe still makes test equipment, but the HP name went to the computer business. I too have owned many HP products, but most ended up in the trash can because of lack of support. I threw away four totally good flatbed scanners simply because one could not get updated software to run them. I also have had to dump functioning printers for the same reason. HP has not got a nickel out of me in the last 25 years for just having a business model that doesn't support their own equipment for us users. Live and learn.

I have the Nikon 10.5 mm fisheye. I used Photoshop to take out the distortion one time and was surprised at how good the over all quality of the image was. Of course the pixel density in some sections of the picture are very different from other areas so you need to be aware of that. This was done using Photoshop 6. Don't know if that feature is still around in the later versions.

Couldn't help this.
A Priest, a minister and a rabbit walked into a blood bank. The nurse asked the rabbit if he knew what his blood type was. The rabbit said it was probably a Type O.

Hello FlyFisher, I have been in your position and have gone through several of the processes that have been recommended. I am 81 and have several thousand slides, then a few years ago my parents passed and I inherited all of their slides and pictures. My father had thousands of slides also. So without thought I proceded to start copying them using an Epson flatbed scanner. After doing just a few I realized that I would be copying slides until my time to leave the planet. Coincidentally friend of mine was going through the same thing. So I thought about this whole issue. What am I going to do with all these copied pictures? Pass them down through the family. Well it turns out that there is very little interest by the family to have these pictures. So after considering all things I decided that I would only copy those pictures with family in them and any with very unique makeup. Those great shots of the Eiffel tower could be dumped since I can get great copy of things like that. Same for the Grand Canyon and so on.
So I looked around for something that would do the job but much faster than using up the life of my flatbed scanner. I ended up buying a cheap slide scanner. Costco was selling them at the time for around $70. It was copier made by Wolverine. This type has a full frame imager, like a camera to capture the copy. It is not scanned, but rather photographed. So I bought it. With this device one can copy a slide every few seconds. The quality was acceptable. In fact if I compared it to the high resolution scanner copies, they were darned good.
So now I am able to make copies of the pictures that possibly might have some interest to my progeny and not consume the life of my flatbed scanner. If I run into any of those wonderful shots, I will simply keep the slide and do whatever in the future with it.
We all have different circumstances. If you are 21 then maybe you want all of those slide copies for the next 70 years. But if you are getting along in life then take a more pragmatic approach. When I finish with my task I will have the pictures digitized plus a collection of really interesting slides. Remember just keeping the slides do not take up much room. I just located acid free cardboard boxes to store slides out of the slide trays so they don't take up much room.
Amazon has a large number of slide copiers at all prices and they also sell the 2 x 2 slide boxes. Look under 2 x 2 coin storage boxes.
Good luck with your copying.