Slides to discs

In 1998 I had more than 153 carousels of slides, mostly showing travels in more than 150 countries and all 50 states, arranged in chronological order, about 100 slides per carousel. Each slide was identified by a number, with the year, country and what it showed. Since 1945, I have also always written a daily journal during international travel. My journals are in the computer.

Showing slides, setting up the projector and screen, is a bother. In 1998 I bought my first camcorder and now mostly take videos, which I put onto VCR tapes and, since 2004, onto DVDs.

I chose the best 5,100 slides and in 1999 projected them and photographed them with a digital camera. I started to discard the remaining 10,000 slides but realized there were many worth saving. I chose the best 2,800 and in 2003-2004 projected them by year taken and photographed them.

I enhanced many slides with Roxio-5 software and put them onto CDs. Some pictures are of poor quality but most are fair, as the automatic projector cycled in and out of focus as I photographed the projected slides.

Early in 2007 I bought an HP G4101 slide scanner for about $150. I used computer software to integrate lists of my slides by country and the slides by year, and tediously began to scan each slide, five at a time. Most are good quality, but the scanner won’t do dark slides, plus it creates horizontal lines that I remove with software.

After adjusting the light and increasing saturation or depth of color in each slide, I now have very good-quality pictures. I put them onto CDs, with several countries per CD and several CDs per continent, and later may put them onto DVDs.

In a few months I will have nearly 7,000 good pictures taken in more than 200 countries. My computer printouts list what each slide is and the year it was taken.

My system is far from perfect. Does anyone have an idea to improve it? E-mail wesley. wilson113@comcast.net.

WESLEY M. WILSON

Olympia, WA