Great shot; great topic.

Many years ago I did a lot of this for a project on early ballistic missiles, V2 and some US birds. I did use a genuine Minox and copy stand and AGFA microfilm (copex). I was working from first generation drawings. Were I doing it again, I would get a good quality macro lens that fit my system.

Balanced lighting, left to right, is crucial; if you don’t know the power situation, invest in a couple of battery powered ones. You’ll use them more than you think. If you have hundreds of shots to make your back will thank you for a copy stand.

Pardon typos; I’m in the hospital for at least another week, and have lines and tubes entangling my extremities.

Why the Minox? A) Fun and B) I had to sneak in the camera;the archive made money selling xerox copies. The Smithsonian had no such hangups.

True, if you trust the encryption.

Our banks are safe, in that sense; I’m about leery of putting my data in the cloud. Much of what I write is much more sensitive than my photos. And yes, it’s a huge hassle to go get the disk from the bank.

Have you made arrangements for off-site storager? What are they? I’m thinking of putting s set of data in oursafe deposit box.

It’s a story:

Back in the 1980s I was a consultant to NASA for Sally Ride’s Mission to Plsnet Earth, an early geophysical and imaging project. NASA panicked when they realized they would be collecting one terabyte a week and had no clue where to put it all.

My advice was that if they needed it, industry would build it. MTPE died and was transformed many times. But I wonder how many TB a week NASA fills today with no worries how to handle it.

I went to an Olympus OM-D system for exactly the same reason. Worked like a charm & saved my shoulders. While Oly has some very big, heavy and expensive lenses, for most purposes most of their smaller “amateur” lenses are more than good enough.

IQ: time to ask yourself how much you really need. How many wall-sized prints will you make in the 3’x4’ size ranges They cost a lot of money whether from a service or on your own printer. If you don’t plan on evens a year, amortizing that printer results in hugely expensive prints. Will you ever again need prints that big. I find I no longer do.

I should have specified: I meant the Leica/Leitz “large” ball head. Built like a tank. My older model takes both 1/4x20 and 3/8” threads. Uses a knob to lock and unlock and is very solid. I have literally been using this one for 55 years w/o a problem and w/o loosening or any other troubles. OK?

PZ

I know of no better ball head than the one Leica makes.

Tenba makes nice bags. They have a messenger sling bag made of pretty light weight Cordura nylon now. It’s not well padded until you put in the Velcro padded dividers, and then it’s very well padded. But I’m with a lot of others on the list: that’s a heck of a lot of mass to put on one shoulder, even if you sling it cross-chest.

Either slim down your field kit to what you’ll need that day or go the back pack route. The problem with a backpack is you have to take it off to get anything.

A good demonstration of why stacking filters is not a good idea. It degrades the IQ and can easily get you in a situation where you can’t separate them when you need to.

Viewmaster frames are crudely the same size as the frames from the Minox series of 8x11mm cameras. Using a Minox enlarger I have printed ultra fine grain Minox negatives to as large as 11x14”. The old Minox factory in Giessen had a display of mural-sized prints, simply huge and dead sharp. Those were taken with the camera not only tripod mounted but sandbagged to eliminate vibrations and triggered with a cable release.

I would guess that you cannot get sharp and fine-grained prints larger than about 4x6” out of a ViewMaster slide. Conceivably 5x7”. The lens wasn’t in the same class as the Minox lenses, and almost all V-M pictures taken by amateurs were hand held on slide film, not the UFgrain microfilms needed to extract the best from a tripod-mounted Minox. Even original Kodachrome (ISO 10) wasn’t that good.

You probably don’t want to disassemble a ViewMaster reel to get at the tiny chip of film. So you’ll either need an expensive scanner or you can lay the reel on a lightbox and photograph it with a digital camera mounting a good macro lens. Since most of today’s “macro” lenses don’t focus much closer than 1:1 you might want to use an extension tube so you can enlarge the V-M picture on your digital sensor. Be sure to mount the camera on a sturdy copy stand and make sure it is level with respect to the V-M picture. And absolutely use a cable release or a self-timer with a long enough delay that the vibration from your touching the camera dies out.

I’ve done a few experiments of this sort with my collection of Minox pictures and my OMD-E-M5ii and the 60mm macro. It “works” but the adjustments are very delicate. It’s also rather slow and tedious; it’s not something (to my mind) you’ll want to do for hundreds of pictures.

I don’t know what’s on the scanner market at a reasonable price these days. I doubt there are any with special holders for ViewMaster reels, but some of the “scanners” that are really just single-purpose digital cameras with built in stage and light might be adaptable to the task. In any event, it’s probably not worthwhile to try for files much bigger than around 5MB for the actual images you’re digitizing. The original information likely isn’t there.

And, pretty much of course, you won’t be able to view any digital files in 3D without a lot of special equipment.

You certainly want to see the Corning Glass Museum in Corning, NY and the Steuben Glass workshop. The Cornell University campus itself is beautiful and picture-worthy, as are the gorges to either side of campus. Lake Geneva’s not bad either. For odd things to look at (from the highway) N of Geneva there’s an old army base which happened to be a nuclear weapons storage site. If memory serves, some of the bunkers are still visible.

And a shovel… And a couple of Mylar survival blankets too. Snow in the mountains can be dangerous. Go prepared, and if you haven’t driven a lot on snow, be cautious and conservative.

Probably nothing will happen; you’ll have warm sun. But I’m a suspenders and belt type when there’s possible winter weather.

Oh, forgot. You’re going in October. You could easily run into snow and ice in the mountains. If you’re driving make sure the rental agency lends you chains or a car with good snow tires.