Well, it was a beautiful weekend.  If you weren’t sick, that is.  So, in order to maximize your shopping potential, I spent the weekend working on scanned slides so that I can post new images that will either interest you, hook you, speak to you, or give you an escape for a while.  This weekend’s focus was steam passenger excursion trains and other passenger and excursion trains of the 1980s.

A while back, you might remember that I said that scanning was the easy part and cleaning/adjusting/optimizing the images was the hard part.  It’s still true.

Prior to scanning, you use a very soft (and expensive) brush to do a rough cleaning of the slide, and then you blow the dust off with air.  You hope.  And then, you scan the slide at 5000 dpi (dots per inch).

And all that dust and all those specks and nasty ugly things you couldn’t see with the naked eye are jumping up and down saying “nya-nya you missed me!” when you pull the slide up on the monitor!  So, you clean the specks off one by one.  You remove the uglies carefully and patiently.

You adjust the colors to compensate for 30+ years of storage – but fortunately, not much shift, as for the most part you shot Kodachrome, which is one of the most stable films there ever was.

You wonder why it seemed that when you managed to get a day off to go photograph, the sun took the day off as well – and you stare at that gray sky…  And you wonder why you shot Kodachrome…  Seriously, it seems like special trains and steam engines were magnets for gray days in the 1980s.  I’ve been away for a while, so I wonder if it’s still like that, or if the decline of som many industries from Chicago on east has made any difference.

So, when you can’t get the colors quite right – or you can, but the sky starts to do strange things, you think “hey – that might make a great image in black and white…”  So, you take a trip to Perfect Photo Suite and pull up the profile that mimics Kodak’s Panatomic X black and white film, and you find that not only did you salvage the image, but that it looks pretty darned good in black and white.

And then, there was harsh lighting.  From the front.  From the side.  From the top.  From the back.  As if the gray skies weren’t bad enough, it also seemed like the trains ran contrary to good light quite often.  So, that bred many a trip to the black and white work space as well.

After all of this work, there are so far two galleries of new images on Laughing Frog Images, and I’ve added another main gallery.

More to follow…

Here’s a sneak peak at some of what’s coming: