Astbury's Adventures in Photography

Light pads are thin surfaces fitted with arrays of small LEDs and may typically be used for tracing and drawing applications. Strangely they are sometimes advertised as being suitable for viewing X-Ray images (is this a common need outside a hospital?) and this may suggest that they would also work for viewing photographic negatives. Light Pad However there is a problem, the surface is shiny and prone to specular reflections, you can see the reflection of my LED OttLite desk lamp in the image above. Even worse is that the array of LEDs shows through when trying to back light an image, so for example here is how a colour slide (positive) looks: Slide viewed directly with LED array showing Not very good but the solution is actually very simple, a layer of diffusion material is needed and this can be done with a sheet of paper. The paper should not be coloured and should be thin, I found a sheet of 41gsm tracing paper works well. To see the difference this makes here's...

Whenever any old family photos are up for grabs I usually try to get them and over the years I've accumulated numerous old prints and slides. Recently I had another couple of batches of slides which I wanted to go through. An assortment of slide boxes Even more slide boxes The snag is that I don't have an easy way of viewing them. Somewhere in the attic I have an old Bell & Howell slide projector, the type that takes one slide at a time but I don't know if it works. With one of the slide batches there was a Halina slide viewer. Halina 531 Slide Viewer However the viewer did not work. Opening it up I found the original batteries were still inside and very corroded. These were replaced but it is still not working. Possibly it may need a new bulb or there may be a problem with it making a circuit, more diagnosis needed. So for the moment I'm holding the slides up to a light for an approximate initial idea of what is on them (may soon be time for a d...