Dear Reader (2023-02-24),
Today we go down a different lane in photographic history, and I offer a new set of possible rabbit holes.
Once upon a time before the flick and click of Instagram, before the horrors of PowerPoint, before the slide projector, and after the camera obscura, there was the magic lantern. “The popularity of magic lanterns waned after the introduction of movies in the 1890s, but they remained a common medium until slide projectors became widespread during the 1950s” (1). This last sentence is from a fascinating article in Wikipedia titled “Magic Lantern” (1).
During the Victorian era, book publishers created and packaged slide sets and readings together for public and private projection events. To this day there continues to be Magic Lantern Societies in North America and in the UK (2). It appears the reading for today’s collection of images has been catalogued by the UK Society (3). I do not have the reading, but another Victorian or Edwardian era treasure coming from my late parent’s estate is this set of 15 magic lantern slides, found in a musty box of unknown origin wrapped in crinkled tissue paper telling tales of love and travel.
At least some of you liked reading the process for Wednesday’s images. Here is the workflow for today’s set. The camera set-up was the same for this set as the one from two days ago, with the exception of the mask used to block excess light from the light panel. Each slide is approximately 3 ¼ inches square.
1 Lightroom
a) Straighten.
2 Photoshop
a) Crop to consistent size and ratio for set.
3 Lightroom
a) Flip Horizontal, as slides were photographed with the printed side closest to the camera.
b) Make same set of adjustments to all slides.
c) Make minor adjustments to each slides (primarily sliding whites right and reducing contrast applied in previous step).
d) Remove spots and imperfections where they are particularly distracting. I considered cleaning the side of the glass slide on which there was no print. I then discarded the idea as as I had visions of something going awry (ie screwing it up). The healing brush in Lightroom has its limits, and therefore I did use Photoshop a couple of times to remove major scratches.
e) Done except for the export.
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As always, all comments are welcome and sought.
Cheers, Sean
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Sources
(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_lantern
(2) https://www.magiclantern.org.uk/
(3) https://www.magiclantern.org.uk/readings/reading.php?id=4003668
All rights for all material on any media reserved – © Sean P Drysdale 2020-2024