High Sierra Topix

Camping 101 - Great uncle and his relatives. Start 'em young! Marsh Lake, looking south, up Little Lakes Valley.

The Citadel, from switchbacks on Dusy Basin Trail, climbing out of Le Conte Canyon.

Sunrise on Giraud Peak, from upper Dusy Basin.

Pine Creek, looking northeast from Honeymoon Lake to Peak 12245.

Tulley Lake, with Silver Divide on Horizon.

Looking SE into upper basin of North Fork Big Pine Creek, from Cloudripper Pass. Lakes #5,6,7; Temple Crag in center of image.

more inspirational than a great view. Approaching the end of my first JMT hike, looking at Mt Whitney from Bighorn Plateau, July 1988


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The view in the other direction at the same time


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And another slide film scan, this time from 1990.

Alger Lakes from Koip Peak Pass after a storm went through. Not the greatest memories of that lightning on the other side of the pass, caught by the weather on the open stretch before Parker Pass. It did make for some pretty dramatic light at the end of the day, though


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I love visiting this thread. The pictures HSTrs post are awesome!

fishmonger- what equipment do you use to scan your slides? Whatever you use is much better than my scanned slides.

Also, how do you keep your old slides from turning color? Most of mine turn to a cyan shade. Is that because of the film I used? Ecktochrome? I think.

And lastly, all my old slides have a lot of dust that is hard to keep out of the scan. The slides attract dust so quickly even when I clean them- static electricity, I think.

By old I mean those from the 1960's-1970's.

That was one of the problems of slide film. One type, such as Kodachrome, would age one way in the slide. Another type, such as Ektachrome, would age a different way in the slide. The cheaper slide processing labs would overuse their chemicals, so the slides that came from there would tend to get muddy colors over time. Some slides would age badly if stored at warm temperatures. The same cheaper labs tended to bond the 35mm slide mounts very poorly, and they would detach. I have 35mm slides that I shot over 50 years ago, and they were processed by cheap labs overseas. Now they are a mess.

As for dust on the slide, first you can manually clean the slide surface very carefully. Also, some of the high end slide scanners have a feature where the slide is first scanned to determine the dust situation on the slide surface. Then it is scanned and the dust spot is digitally corrected before the file is saved. However, if you turn the feature up too strongly, it will drop some of the finest detail.

I have an excellent 4000 line Canon slide scanner sitting here at my elbow. The only trick is that the Canon drivers are no longer available for a modern Windows computer. However, an inexpensive generic driver still exists (Vuescan). For most of these scanners, you can build a custom profile so that it autocorrects for muddy colors.

Wandering Daisy wrote: ↑Sat Mar 26, 2022 8:27 pm fishmonger- what equipment do you use to scan your slides? Whatever you use is much better than my scanned slides.

Also, how do you keep your old slides from turning color? Most of mine turn to a cyan shade. Is that because of the film I used? Ecktochrome? I think.

And lastly, all my old slides have a lot of dust that is hard to keep out of the scan. The slides attract dust so quickly even when I clean them- static electricity, I think.

By old I mean those from the 1960's-1970's.

I use a Nikon CoolScan 4000ED (the 5000ED is even better). Since I have 10,000+ slides, I also use a stack feeder and let the computer do the raw scanning by itself, 50 slides at a time. The scanner is pretty slow at the best quality (it uses up to 16 passes over the slide, reducing errors and getting multiple exposure levels for more detail in the dark areas).

The software I use is ViewScan. The scanner has a built-in infrared light channel used for automatic dust removal by the scanner software. For best results, I test scan a slide of each roll to get the color balance close, then dust them off before scanning using an air can. The stuck on stuff really needs the auto dust removal in the software. Doing that manually is near impossible. The rest to get things right is color correction in Photoshop Camera Raw, one slide at a time. I scan at the maximum bit depth of the scanner to TIFF format, then process it in Photoshop before saving the final JPEG (much smaller).

Some slides have lost more color than others. I think the quality of the E6 slides varies vastly depending on where you had them processed in those years. The better pro lab stuff just lasts much longer. They likely changed the chemicals much more frequently than the cheap places or some of the mail in services. I recall buying my Fuji film with pre-paid mail-in development envelopes at the time these old Sierra hikes happened. I would think that those are among my best looking slides after all those years. Those I ran through unknown cheap processing in Germany at some time in the early 80s can vary from great to absolute loss of red channel.

Kodachrome 25 may last much longer, but the colors the film produced were flat from day 1, so I don't have much of that. I think some of my Sierra shots from the early years may be on Kodachrome, but that stuff was expensive and I know I mostly shot consumer Fuji RD 100 in those early Sierra years.

Storage of old slides really needs a cool, dry space, and at least attempted archival environment (not in trays, but in archival sleeves). Over the years, I wasn't always able to do that, but I kept the slides in a relatively decent space that prevented the worst deterioration. Much of what I am posting now, I scanned about 5 years ago, but I still occasionally fire up the scanner.


A scan from the 1990 hike - On the PCT between Agnew Meadows and Agnew Pass, July during the monsoon. Flowers were pretty epic that summer, but we got wet a lot


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Thanks for explaining. Your photo gear is way more than I will ever have. But it is nice to know if I wanted a particular slide to be digitized professionally, I could have it done. My answer to a lot of problems with color, be it digitized slides or my current digital photos, is turn it into a black-and-white. I am beginning to really appreciate B&W photography.

I have some real black and white coming up from the 1990 hike real soon. I used some B&W film after the JMT when we did a side trip to Clouds Rest. Nowadays you can turn color photos into convincing black and white. Lots of tools available. It just doesn't quite hit me as much as the real thing, which had severe limitations compared to what you can do today with digital originals that have massive contrast ranges.

I tried converting this scan to black and white but don't like the result as much as the color version. Maybe because the color is what makes this image interesting in the first place. Again, from 1990. Another monsoon July day was ending.


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Back Giant above Muir Pass being really black. July 1990


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