Using a Slide Duplicator 24/02/19, 18*47

Using a Slide Duplicator

Words & Pictures Peter Bargh

If you submit your pictures to magazines or newspapers you may want to

play safe and duplicate the photos, especially if you only have one version
of the slide you are sending.

A slide duplicator, as the name suggests, lets you

make copies of these slides, but it goes much
further. You can also make prints from slides,
slides from negatives, black & white from colour
or mono-colour from black & white. You can also
add filters for creative effect, maybe to soften the
image, add a graduated sky or produce a sepia
effect. And now, even more useful, you can use
one to convert film into pixels.

There are two types of slide duplicator the ones

professionals use that are like upturned enlarger heads
made by manufacturers such as Bowens. These use
tungsten or flash light with special film and colour
correction filters to get a duplicate image thats almost
identical to the original. Theyre very expensive and
difficult to use for the inexperienced copier.

Here is an example of a negative copied and made into

a print using a digital SLR. If you want to copy
negative film onto film you need a special duplicating
film that is made with a blue mask that counteracts the
orange to give natural colours.

The other type, and the one were looking at here, is a zoom
slide duplicator that attaches to an SLR by replacing the
interchangeable lens. There are various models available
including Soligor, Ohnar and Jessops. The one here is an old
style Jessops model, but they all work in the same way. You
have a tube that is around 6 to 8in long with a built-in lens
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that magnifies the slide to give a full frame copy. Some have
an adjustable barrel that lets you zoom in on a section of the
slide. This one goes from 1x life-size to 2.5x. Although there
are four zoom settings you can use any mid point giving you
infinitely variable control between the two extremes.

Unlike the pro duplicator the 50 zoom model is easy to use. You just attach
it to your camera using a T2 mount. These cost about 10 and are available
in all camera fittings, including autofocus. There are no automatic
connections on the mount so you need to use a camera with either an
aperture-priority or manual exposure mode.

You fit the slide into a carrier at the opposite end to the camera
and this can be moved up or down and left or right for selective
cropping. The duplicator has a fixed aperture of around f/16 so
its pretty dark to see through.

To help focus, you can remove the diffuser

on some models and point the copier at a
bright light.

You can use any type of light source to make your slide copies, providing
you use the appropriate film or filters. The easiest is daylight but flash is a
good alternative providing you can control the output. If you decide on
daylight choose a bright day and point it at the sky. Use the cameras meter
and shoot, bracket the exposure on your first attempt by changing the
shutter speed manually or using the exposure compensation setting in
aperture-priority auto. Make a note of your settings so you can follow these
guides for perfect exposures in the future.

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Here a black & white negative was copied and once in the image editing
program inverted so that the tones became positive like the print you
would make. A slight tweak was required in Curves (you can use
brightness/ contrast too) to adjust the tones to the required range.

When using flash you need to take it off the camera using a necessary
coaxial cord connected to the cameras PC socket then point it back into the
duplicator. If your camera has TTL flash and you can afford the proper TTL
flash cords youll make the job much easier as the camera will control the
flash exposure almost perfectly. If not youll need to do tests to determine
the ideal distance of the flash. As a rough starting point place it about 25cm
from the camera, pointing back into the duplicator and take a shot, move
the flash 5cm further away and repeat. Continue in 5cm increments until
the flashs about 60cm away. It seems like a lot of wasted film and messing
about, but its worth it. When the results are processed, one shot should be
close to perfect use this distance for all future flash copying.

If you prefer to shoot indoors you can use tungsten light, but youll need an
80b blue filter to remove the yellow cast these lights create on normal
daylight film. An f/16 aperture means the shutter speed may be slow, but

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you dont have to worry about camera shake, because the slide position
doesnt change while youre making the exposure.

With a duplicator you can also recompose the

image, by taking the main subject to one side or
blowing it up to fill the frame, removing all the
surround. The advantage here is if you missed a
pole coming out of someones head when you shot
the original, its easy to crop it out when copying. By
setting the extension to the required magnification
you than use the zoom barrel to focus. If it's not
quite right adjust the extension fractionally and
you'll see the image through the viewfinder snap
into sharp focus.

You can lighten or darken an original, give it more contrast, alter the
colour using filters or you use it to make copies to send off to competitions
or publishers, keeping your valuable originals safe.

As photographers start to go digital there are lots of slide duplicators

appearing in the classified ads and on the eBay auction site. If you decide
to buy a digital SLR you can attach the copier and make digital pictures
from your slides much quicker than you could with a film scanner. If you
have lots of negatives and slides youll find the process much easier. Focus
the first one and then all you have to do is shoot and replace. The results
are not bad at all as we illustrate here. And the beauty with digital is you
can take one shot, check exposure adjust and re-shoot until you get
everything spot on.

I attached the duplicator to a Nikon fit Fuji FinePix S2pro. The camera has
to be set to manual as it wont work in aperture-priority with non AF lenses.
Then you have to guess the exposure. I found the shutter speed of 1/60sec
perfect for a bright winters day.

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One other thing to be aware of is that the digital SLRs CCD is smaller
than film so you dont get as much coverage. This makes it impossible to
copy a full frame and on the Fuji the effective magnification is 1.5x. The
shot on the left is a full frame scan and the one on the right is from the
largest area you can capture using the Fuji Finepix Pro.

Quality comparison
To give you an idea of how good a digital duplication is here's the original
scanned to PhotoCD by a professional lab, compared with the scan from a
HP flatbed scanner with a film attachment, a Microtek dedicated film
scanner and the slide duplicator.

The highest resolution file on PhotoCD is an image with 3072x2048pixels

shown here cropped from full size.

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Here the HP Deskjet was set to maxium scan resolution of 1200dpi

creating a smaller file

The 4000dpi scan from the Microtek film scanner had to be cropped more
to fit on this page but again shows a comparison size scan. It's the sharpest
option, but maybe too sharp as it's picking up every flaw on the film!

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Here the Jessops slide duplicator was used on the Fuji FinePix S2 Pro
giving an smooth toned image that can be sharpened further, if desired,
using your image editing program. It's certainly worth keeping your
duplicator if you own on and will at some stage buy a digital SLR. Also
worth picking up if you have a digital SLR and want a low cost way to make
digital files from your slides.

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