Monday, January 18, 2010

Today I learned how to scan slides, which was pretty similar to scanning negatives. Most of the settings are the same--Color, transparency, 2400 dpi for the resolution--but the program has to be set to "positive" rather than "negative." The slides were a little easier to handle than the negatives, they scan more quickly, and they seem to attract less dust, so I had much less clean-up to do in Photoshop. However, the colors on some of the slides appeared a little dull and faded, so we sometimes increase the contrast a bit to make them look sharper. I was working on images of opera productions again, and I enjoyed seeing more pictures of previous shows. They've had some really beautiful sets and costumes.

I also started pulling some reference prints and negatives from the Indiana University Photoservices collection in preparation for entering scanned negatives into the new database we will start using soon. Since only the negatives will be scanned, we need to make sure all the information on the reference prints is also written on the envelopes of negatives so it can be included in the database. A lot of the reference prints have notes on the back about the subject of the photograph.

Today I worked on pulling negatives for the prints in one of the "Biology and Botany" folders, and Brad and I discussed some of the strange images that appear in older collections of photo-archives, particularly in photographs of experiments in science departments. I'm a little nervous at the prospect of running across images of animal experiments in some of the earlier photographs. Fortunately, the folder I was working with had nothing more unusual than some images from the 1930s of what looked like mold growing in Petri dishes. Most of the images are either portraits of faculty or show students and faculty at work, often surrounded by racks of test tubes. It's a fascinating glimpse of some of IU's science programs in the 1930s and 1940s.