More Slide Copying Tests with the Tamron 90mm F/2.8 Di Macro VC USD Lens

Portsmouth VA Police Officer John D. Howton (Ret.) and Christopher A. Mook;
circa 1985

Last week, I continued to make additional tests with the above titled Tamron macro lens to ascertain if I can make acceptable copies of my thousands of Kodachrome and Ekatchrome slides from the past 40 years.  My initial testing of the lens and camera/sensor combination looked good and gave me a green light to proceed, but I wanted to vary my procedure somewhat to find the best results.

I pulled out a couple of Kodachrome slides from the mid-1980s.  I chose these two particular slides as they were made during the midst of the summer, on cloudless blue sky days and in the middle of the day.  I was looking for maximum contrast to see if the sensor on the D800E would retain detail in the shadows as well as in the highlights.

The first image, right, is of my son when he was about three years old.  (He is 31 now.)  The officer is wearing a dark blue uniform, the shadows are deep.  The roof in the background is white as is the motorcycle's paint (warm white), the helmet and, of course, my son's light blond hair.  I'm not sure if you can or cannot see it on your monitor, but the image is sharp, there is shadow detail as well as highlight detail.  The detail in my son's hair is evident as well as in the officer's shirt and concrete in the shadow under the motorcycle.  I'm very happy with this copy.

The second image is another Kodachrome of my father-in-law, deceased about 6 1/2 years now, from the same time period--the mid 1980s.  He is in his front yard on a sunny summer midday wearing a white shirt.  The copy is sharp, color is good, contrast is good and the white shirt has retained a lot of detail.  In fact, I could even lighten the white shirt a bit and still retain sufficient detail.  Again, I'm very happy with this slide copy.

Earlier, I used my tripod propped at an angle over my light table to construct a makeshift copy outfit.  That wouldn't do. To make these, I purchased an inexpensive copy stand (Kaiser), ensured the light table was parallel to the sensor, set a custom white balance for the light table's lights, used aperture priority at F/5.6, mirror lock-up and set the shutter to fire after a delay of 2 seconds.  I focused using Live View, which focuses directly off the sensor.  The shutter speed at ISO 100 was 1/80 second.  I'm not sure I like that shutter speed in that range as the setup may be subject to slight vibrations.   In the future, I may increase the ISO to 400, which would give me a shutter speed of 1/320 second without any loss in quality.  I will also try some exposures at F/8 to see if I can find any differences.  But, since I had previously calibrated my lens and determined the sharpest aperture (F/6.3), I feel pretty good about F/5.6 and/or F/8.

Once I brought the images into Lightroom 5.3, I set the calibration for "portrait" to keep the long gradation and proper contrast.  That seems to work well for the slides I have so far copied.  I tweaked them to taste, but there was no extreme corrections that needed to be made.  The color was good, the shadow and highlight detail was there and the sharpness was as I expected.

So far, as I refine my procedure, I am finding the extraordinary dynamic range of the Nikon D800E's sensor and the sharpness and flat field of the Tamron macro lens make a great combination to use for this project.

I think my next tests will be constructing or buying a small wooden box in which to place my Nikon SB800 and try copying additional slides using flash with a fast shutter speed (1/250th second), using translucent neutral glass or plastic to diffuse the flash.  I think I would feel more comfortable, when copying hundreds of slides, to use a flash unit and fast shutter speed as I would be trying to achieve some sort of speed to increase the processes efficiency.

So far, so good.

Thanks for looking.  Enjoy!

Dennis Mook

Many of my images can be found at www.dennismook.com.  Please pay it a visit.  Thank you.


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