Old Dog Photography

I’ve been scanning some old family slides, just to get them into the digital realm before they completely fall apart. Some of the slides are in pretty good shape; many are faded nearly to the point of being clear; a few are in just awful shape and have some weird splotchy pattern on the emulsion side of the slide.

Unfortunately, a good slice of our family history is tied up in this last group — in particular, all my parents’ slides from the 1950’s (this covers when they were dating, their marriage, and a few years before my brother & I showed up on the scene). As an example, let’s look at one slide from 1957 showing branding time on the ranch my Dad’s parents used to live on in Arizona:

You can see the splotchiness particularly clearly in the sky, but it covers the entire emulsion. Stains? Fungus? Who knows? Here’s what it looks like at an angle:

I didn’t know if the splotches were removable, but thought it was worth a try in the interest of recovering an important decade in our family history. Meanwhile, I thought the process I went through to rescue these slides may be of interest to somebody else facing a similar situation — thus, this blog post.

For lack of any better ideas, I bought some emulsion cleaner, which luckily came along with a free sample of lint-free cloths. The label on the emulsion cleaner bottle claims that it’ll remove “most” things from a slide’s emulsion, so long as they’re not water soluble. A few bits of advise first, should you decide to go this route:

• The cleaner stinks, is highly flammable, and probably would cause you health problems if you inhaled enough of the fumes from it. You absolutely, positively MUST use this in a well-ventilated area. I opted for the kitchen countertop, so I could use the vent fan over our cooktop to get the fumes out of the house.
• The cleaner seems to happily dissolve a number of things (like paint, varnish, some plastics…) so take care to keep it just where you want to use it. I put a few paper towels under my slides to avoid potential damage to the countertop.
• Start with a less-critical slide as a “guinea pig,” just to make sure your slides aren’t so old that the cleaner damages or destroys the emulsion. Even then, scan it before you start working on it to be doubly safe. You can always throw the scan of the “dirty” slide away, or just use it in a blog post like this one!

Anyway here’s my setup:

Once you have the gear, cleaning is pretty easy — split open the original slide frame (likely cardboard), carefully pull out the slide film, squirt a little cleaner on the emulsion side, and wipe gently with a lint-free cloth. While you’re at it, you probably want to flip the slide over and do the other side too (just to cover all the bases). Once you’ve done this simple bit of cleaning, just slip the slide into its new modern frame, and here you have it:

At this point, the stinky work is done and you can get down to the real business of digitizing your slide. Re-scan it, and touch up any remaining blemishes in your image editor of choice (I used Photoshop Elements), and voila! A bit of family history recovered!