Last night I made two scans of an ET 160 (Tungsten balance) Ektachrome slide. This film was designed for use with incandescent lighting.
I exposed this slide as part of sequnece of night images at the Connecticut Trolley Museum in East Windsor, CT in December 1993.
The first scan was using an Epson V600 flatbed scanner powered with Epson Scan 2 software. The second was using a Nikon LS5000 Slide scanner powered with the latest VueScan software (version 9.7.96).
Other than scale the scans for presentation here, I made no changes to color, exposure, sharpness etc.
I’ve included a greatly magnified portion of each scan for comparison.
Epson V600 scan; 3200 dpi TIF format, scaled for internet.Nikon LS 5000 scan at 4,000 dpi TIF format, scaled for internet.V600 scan enlarged.Nikon LS 5000 scan enlarged
Green Moutain Railroad GP9 1850 leads the railroads freight XR1 through a rock cut on the former Rutland Railroad near Gassetts, Vermont on November 19, 1992.
I was interested in featuring the use of old rails to support stones in the cut and had followed this freight since its engines left the railroad’s round house at North Walpole, NH, earlier that morning. The recent installation of an oscillating headlight on th GP9 also caught my attention
First round of adjustments to correct for color temperature and adjust shadow detail.In this version, I increased local contrast and lightened the overall scan while adjusting the highlights and shadows to retain detail and black point.
Working with my old Nikon F3T and Nikkor f1.8 105mm, I exposed this slide on Kodachrome 25 at f5.6 at 1/125 second.
Slide scanned with a Nikon LS-5000 slide scanner at 4000 dp, adjusted and scaled using Lightroom.
On the evening of Easter Sunday 1988, I visited the old Buffalo, Rochester & Pittsburgh station and yard at East Salamanca, New York.
CSXT was still a relatively new railroad, and this southward freight from Buffalo featured former Baltimore & Ohio GP40/GP40-2s painted for CSXT component Chessie System but with CSXT sublettering.
CSXT was in the process of spinning off it’s former BR&P trunk to Genesee & Wyoming start up Buffalo & Pittsburgh. I was anticipating the change, but the sale was still several months away.
I made a series of Kodachrome 25 slides of the train changing crews at dusk using my Leica M2 with 50mm Summicron firmly mounted on a tripod. Unfortunately, I miscalculated the exposure and my slides are about one stop too dark. This one was made at f4 at ¼ second.
Part of my problem was that my Sekonic Studio Deluxe lightmeter wasn’t accurate in low light. Another issue was that I didn’t compensate for reprocity failure, which was a characteristic of Kodachrome films in low light.
April 3, 1988. Kodachrome 25 exposed for 1/4 second at f4 with Leica M2 and f2.0 50mm lens.
I scanned this K25 slide with a Nikon LS-5000 scanner using VueScan software which enabled a multiple pass scan to maximize data capture of highlights and shadows. I imported the high-res (4000 dpi) scan into Lightroom and adjusted the file to compensate for underexposure.
Yesterday I scanned this 30 year Kodachrome 25 slide using a Nikon Coolscan5000 operated with VueScan 9.6.09 scanning software..
The unmodified scan is a bit on the dark side. I’d been chasing Conrail ELOI (Elkhart to Oak Island) eastbound on the former Erie Railroad on typically dull western New York November day.
Many of my photos from that chase were exposed on black & white film using my father’s old Rollei Model T. At least one of those appeared in CTC Board as a Conrail new illustration back in the day.
When I reached Olean, I wanted to feature the crossing with the former PRR route to Buffalo, which was then also a Conrail secondary main line, and I made this panned view of ELOI’s lead locomotive crossing the diamonds.
I exposed this at f5.6 1/30 second to capture the motion of the locomotive.
Unmodified scan, except for scaling for internet presentation (the original is about 110MB).
After scanning, I imported the slide into Lightroom and made a variety of corrections to improve the appearance of the image. This included slight cropping to improve the level; color correction, lightening of the shadow areas and over-all contrast control.
I’ve include both the unmodified scan and corrected image here.
Corrected scan outputted as a JPG file for internet.
On November 15, 1987, I followed a loaded PLMT coal train east from Buffalo, New York. This train had operated with Pittsburgh & Lake Erie locomotives and was being handled by Guilford’s Delaware & Hudson via trackage rights over Conrail’s former Erie Railroad.
Try to fit all that on the slide mount!
At the time these coal trains operated about once a week, and while it wasn’t uncommon to find P&LE locomotives, catching the trains on film was challenging.
I made this view on Kodachrome 25 with my Leica M2 with 50mm Summicron Lens. It’s a badly under exposed long pan (about 1/8 of a second) from a hillside off the Canisteo River Road, in the valley of that name, a few miles east of Adrian.
The original slide was made at the very end of daylight, and the slow speed ISO25 film didn’t give me the needed sensitivity to capture the scene with adequate exposure.
That’s a long way of saying; it was dark and I underexposed the film.
Here’s the scaled, but unadjusted scan. It’s about 3 to 4 stops underexposed. The slide is nearly opaque except for the sky. Exposure was about f2.0 at 1/8 second on Kodachrome 25 (ISO 25).
Thankfully, I didn’t through the slide away.
I scanned it using VueScan 9×64 (edition 9.6.09) software and a Nikon Super Coolscan 5000 slide scanner. It opted for manual controls; I selected 4000 dpi input, under ‘color’ I used the Kodachrome K14 color profile, and while output was set at 4000 dpi as a TIF file.
I then imported the TIF into Lightroom for color, exposure and contrast adjustment, necessary to compensate for my extreme underexposure. To hold sky detail, I applied a digital graduated neutral density filter.
Here’s my first round of adjustments. I thought the sky and overall color balance seemed a bit otherworldly so I zeroed out the adjustments and started again. Compare this with the image below.
Although similar, this version is better balanced and looks closer to the original scene. Although underexposed, the Kodachrome film was able to capture some detail over more than 6 stops, allowing for post processing adjustment.
Although slightly grainy, the results are much improved over the original and captures my intended effect of the train rolling at speed through the Canisteo Valley at dusk.
