Keeping busy

Live out in the sticks,started mowing the lawns,grass growing like mad,kept busy as my wife is recovering from a knee replacement,took her for physio yeaterday,from today physio closed for at least three weeks, dreading weelkly shop on friday, last week i queued for 40 mins to get to the till.Watched all those idiots on the tele totally ignoring the curfew,thick as two short planks. got plenty to do in workshop with restoring stationary engines,therestored Stuart 600 needs mounting on a trolley,then theres a Ruston Hornsby and a Robinson hot air engine to restore. Rally season hit hard no shows until at least July,all my regular shows are cancelled,Got some weed killing to do as they are starting to grow,lot easier to grow weeds than veg, Then theres further improvement to my security as towrags thieved 140 gallons of heating oil from my tank. I am fully occupied I do know how the majority keep moaning that they are bored,all they seem to know is hitting a keyboard.

Just enjoyed 30 mins chat with my Daughter, Son in Law and Grandson who is one today, we had a video call with an APP called Houseparty, wife amazed what we can now do, not bad for a Technophobe now off out side to clean a drain that I unblocked last night then back in the garage for some more tinkering.

Martin P

re 35mm slides.

I've tried one of these scanning devices and found it useless. In the end I followed Harold Hall's advice which was to make a lightbox (3mm white faced MDF, white to the inside & 2 x 25W candle bulbs), a piece of white translucent plastic & a support/guide for the slides. The slides were then rephotographed by my Canon A640 camera, transferred into the computer and then corrected by Gimp (barrel distortion, dirt, hairs, colour correction, sharpened if necessary by means of Unsharp Mask).

Here are three versions of a photo subjected to this treatment a few years ago:

Original:

Note the distortion & bad colour.

Intermerdiate correction.

Notice the improvement, but still slightly blurred.

Final after using Unsharp mask

Early results were poor because I didn't understand what I was doing, but even then, the results were better. Oh I must point out that these are 50 years old.

Once I got into the swing of things, I found it quite fascinating to see how much I, a rank amateur could improve these old clapped out photos. Even more interesting was trying to determine just where they were taken - and that lead to a few surprises. eg one that I thought was at the top of Scotland was actually on Skye, and Google Street View has an almost identical version of a waterfall up Glen Nevis.

Cheers,

Peter G. Shaw

Fine work one those photos, Peter!

You've all probably seen that humorous poster Walker Midgeley sell, about being put on Earth to complete a certain number of project so making immortality likely...

I know how that cartoon character feels! Six or seven engineering-related projects including slowly completing fitting out the workshop itself. Still, in Week One of Staying At Home ( a new version of the Bee Gees' song there? It even scans) I've -

Washed the car.

Started sorting and cataloguing the multi-drawer storage units in the body of a bench-height trolley I made as the stand for a Warco sheet-metal former. Rather than individually labelling each little drawer I have lettered the 4 units and numbered the drawers in each (A 1 to 60, B 1 to 24...), with the contents on a spread-sheet print, so it's easy to alter. Also I've found card labels never stay in their mouldings on those plastic drawers.

Mowed the lawn.

Planted onion seeds whose packet bears the legend "Plant before Sept. 2014".

Had a tentative attempt to enter the void under the house, the eventual aim being to secure cables and pipes some bodge-artist has left merely hanging in mid-air across the space. Not sure if being a caver for over 40 years has encouraged me to think I can get down there, or made me more wary!

Rang a few friends to keep in touch in these difficult times. I've heard people on the radio say the present restrictions being the most onerous in the UK "in peace-time". From what I can make out, they are more onerous than in war-time too: in WW2 the main obstacle to ordinary life seems to have been rationing - pubs, cinemas, etc. were all still open a far as possible.

Continued working on the steam-wagon is the vague hope of having it in at least steam-raising condition for a rally that so far at least has not been cancelled as far as I can determine.

I was half way through chiselling hinge recesses in a shed door at the end of the garden when I thought how much neater and easier it would have been if I had electricity for the router or a battery router when I realised that as the door was off its hinges I could have just taken it down to the house where there is electricity. Doh!

Peter,

I remember my children buying me a slide copier. As you say it was rubbish. I attacked the problem in a slightly different way. Hung the screen on the wall mounted my camera above the projector and did the lot.

The results were good. I just wished I'd washed the slides first.

That must have been over 20 years ago.

Am fortunate I have a small garden so digging up my wild flowers (weeds) etc.

Then a break getting meals ready and watch the news.

Do a few exercises to try to help the old creaking gate

Workshop for a few hours there's plenty to do or modify.

Any minor work to do in the house as a last resort.

Always books to read or contact other old gits to see if ok in this dodgy virus time.

Can do a check on the Straight liners Facebook and other bike or car groups some posts are hilarious or informative on builds.

I thought was in the wild as no noise from vehicles as live near a busy road and just the birds chirping.

Was good to see some fellow neighbours at 8pm clapping the NHS and other front line workers at this stressful time.

So a busy day I will not get bored.

Edited By Windy on 26/03/2020 23:34:01

Those of us with partners, we now work together for 1/2 a day - may be gardening, house work or tidying up the workshop, then we have the rest of the day to ourselves. Its working well so far.

This is one random pic chosen from the many many slides I copied with a cheapo scanner. I don't think it's bad at all considering the young lad at the front is a 60yr younger version of me and the original colour slide film tended to this brown hue and its an accurate representation. Yeah probably could be improved by colour editing but then it wouldn't be as originally taken.. It may be that dad was pretty pedantic about storing his pics so minimal dust or decomp.

As to keeping busy..penty to do here always. Now that ome of my fileds are drying I can chain at least one - flatten mole hills and dethatch.
I have part of the veggie patch to rotorvate and more mowing to do.
Seedlings for the greenhuse are still under growlights indoors but I'm a bit two-minded about general veggies with the reality that I have to crawl to weed and widlife usually gets more out of them than I do. I can cage enough soft fruit but caging the veggie patch isn't practical on cost and nuisance. Last year was yet another year when stray sheep ate part or it, pheasants and hares took their toll and the cabbage whites wrote off most of the rest...

One of the big jobs this year when it dries enough is to dig out a length of narrow seasonal stream and concrete the bottom of it to allow me to mortar blocks along the sides. This years rainfall caused part of the bank to break down and flood through the barn. I'm not looking forwards to it - it'll be a hands and knees job scraping out the silt and chiselling the slate rocks more level. i can get at it with power tools but not with a digger.

pgk

I am still gardening but have to slow down a bit now as the council have stopped collection of green waste and as I have now dug up the area that I use to burn excess rubbish have to rely on the collection.

Managed a little workshop time but only for making a bowl which now needs some bits cut and filed from some thin sheet metal

Hi Peter G. Shaw, I have a Epson Perfection V550 Photo scanner, (it scans ordinary documents as well) which has a professional mode, which has abilities to adjust virtually everything and includes Digital ICE Technology and is very good, although I've had it for a number of years now. I basically bought this one, because it has the ability of scanning the old 2 1/4" x 3 1/4" negatives, black/white and colour, which it does a good job also on old and scratched ones. Below is a photo from September 1977 taken with a Halina point and shoot and having those old flash cubes, It produced photos that would print out at 3 1/2" square, so basically a cheapo snap shot one. The first image is a slide preview image where default settings are used, bearing in mind this is one that was stored in a slide box, but has suffered from a bit of damp and mould growth, the full slide was scanned. You will notice the default scans have the blue colour to them as most seem to get and this was an Agfacolor Safety Film.

The next one is still with the default settings but has been cropped but Digital Ice is on.

Next one has been with some of the settings adjusted and the backlight correction is set to high and the following one with the backlight correction set to low.

This final one has the backlight correction set to medium and I think it gives the best picture.

All of them were scanned at 600 DPI. and 48 bit colour, with the Unsharp mask selected. I haven't printed this one off, but others from the same box have been, and they print off very good for their age and condition.

Regards Nick.

P.S. I forgot to mention that no other software programme has be used on these scans.

Edited By Nicholas Farr on 27/03/2020 11:33:15

Nigel,

Thanks for the compliment.

David,

I don't have a projector. Also, whilst the A640 is quite good, it's not the best.

pgk,

That is far, far better than anything my cheapo version produced. I haven't opened it up (can't be bothered), but I have a suspicion that mine has a single light source in the middle of, I assume, the rear of the film. Certainly on a lot of photos, I got excess lightness in the middle.

To all,

The A640 is a 10MegaPixel camera with a 4X zoom lens and f/2.8 - f/4.1. Maximum image size is 3648 x 2736 pixels. It can be used in Auto mode or in a wide variety of modes including Macro and Fixed Distance (I think that's somewhat right). Anyway, it took a lot of experimenting both with the lightbox and the camera, and involved making a standoff to always set the camera at a fixed distance. Too near, and I lost some of the information, too far away and I got a large black border around the photo. The standoff represented what I thought was the best compromise, and using software I used to crop the photo to remove the top & bottom black borders, then used Lens Distortion to correct the barrel distortion followed by careful copy & paste to get rid of mucky marks etc. I did use a soft brush on the slides to remove some of the dust etc before taking the photo, but even so I still had to use software to clean them.

Bearing in mind that some of the slides date from 1965, most were, eventually, corrected to a reasonable condition, ok, maybe not as original, but what was lost didn't really matter. I did have a few failures which were too far gone to do anything with, and I did have one that although too poor to be satisfactorily corrected, I was only able to determine the location by looking at the others taken at the same time, noting that there was a recognisable feature on the horizon, and then realizing that the carpet factory in the foreground had been replaced by housing!

I did wonder about a scanner adaptor, but didn't think they were justified for a one-off event. Filmwise, most were Kodak 64 colour reversal slides (hang-on, that doesn't sound correct, so let's just say Kodak 64), whilst a few were Agfa.

Peter G. Shaw

p.s. One thing I do now regret was in chucking out some photos taken in the early years with the Cosmic 35. I seem to recall that some of them were of, shall we say, early girlfriends.

I recall it was under £20 and it's sitting in it's original box in a cupboard never needing to be used by me again..

I've just been reviewing a few more/. Some are quite out of focus but frankly that's down to my dad and his ancient camera whch still had a short foldable bellows and fixed 35mm lens he'd acquired sometime during WW2. I don't recall the make. Manual focus with no visual check and a seperate light meter. Knowing my old man it would never have had any professional servicing though he might have blown dust out and wiped the lens ocassionally.

According to my records, mine cost £60 from Aldi in 2013. Hardly a cheapo version, but as I recall, cheaper than others on the market at the time. Ah well, you can't win 'em all.

Peter G. Shaw