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September 8, 2008
A New Toy and Some Old Memories
I've been playing with this new toy. It scans 35mm slides to JPEG files.
Between us, Shirley and I have hundreds, maybe thousands, of 35 mm slides. Some are as old as the mid fifties. While we still have a slide projector, we have often wished that we had more of these pictures in digital format. I know there are services but being able to do it ourselves is a great thing. And it's also a great excuse to get a few hundred more gigs of hard drive.
Yesterday I scanned one of several carousels of photographs from my time at Gezer. I took most of these pictures in 1971 and 1973. I haven't gotten to the remainder from 1971 or those from 1970. Going through them sure brings back memories. It also often brings back lack of memory. What in the heck are some of these pictures pictures of? The individual quality of the slides is very uneven. Some are quite good and some are awful. All of them have deteriorated over time but many were lousy to begin with. Scanning doesn't improve a bad picture or a damaged slide. But sometimes they can be Photoshopped a little to resort fix some of their color and contrast issues.
Here is a 1971 picture of our daughter at age three. She's sitting on one of the Gezer boundary inscriptions.
The scan of this slide is rather good. It's the original picture that is bad.
For those who are interested, the line at the bottom of the inscription reads in Greek letters, Αλκιου, "Belonging(?) to Alkios." What does this mean? No one is completely certain but it may well mean that Gezer belonged to someone named Alkios or that it was part of his estate. The line above is upside down with regard to the lower one and reads in Hebrew (It is common to say "Hebrew" but is it Aramaic?) תחם גזר, "boundary of Gezer." This is why I think it still okay to call these "boundary inscriptions." The exact date of these inscriptions is subject to some dispute. Some scholars date them to ca 100 CE while others would date them earlier by 200 years or more. The issues involving the dating of these inscriptions are rather complex and involve an interplay of paleographic and archaeological considerations. Sorting this out is well beyond my capabilities. Over the years, various explorers and excavators have found twelve of the inscriptions. About half of them are still in situ. Most of them are nearly identical one with the other.
I'm not completely sure which inscription is in the picture. I've been trying figure it out from Reich and Greenhut's map. It's hard for me to believe that I would take my not quite two year old son, my three year old daughter and my wife 2000 meters or so from the tell for them see one of these things. I'd already seen a couple of them by that time. But then, it's hard to believe that Shirley and I would take such young children to Israel for the summer, particularly when she and the kids spent most of their time in Jerusalem and I only visited them on the weekends. It was crazy but we'd both do it again.
Posted by Duane Smith at September 8, 2008 8:42 PM | Read more on Archaeology |
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Comments
How much did that lovely new toy cost? I have a similar problem with thousands of slides from archaeology projects. I used to take both B/W photos for journals, and color slides for lectures. Then in the late '70s, I bought a slide copier that alowed me to rephotograph slides. From then on I only shot slides, and I reshot a B/W print from the slide for journals.
Nowdays, everyone wants digital.
Posted by: Gary Hurd at September 9, 2008 7:29 AM
Hi Gary,
This toy was a gift, so I'm not supposed to know how much it cost. But a quick look at our bookkeeping software tells me that someone in our household paid $140.00 for some unknown purchase charged to our gift budget a couple of days before I received it. And that's about what I've seen mid-quality ones sell for on the internet. You can get them for under $100.00 if you look around and a professional one might cost several hundred to a couple of thousand dollars.
Posted by: Duane at September 9, 2008 8:52 AM
I need to get something like that to scan my slides. I have a flatbed scanner that also scans slides, but it is quite cumbersome & slow. Is yours easy to use? How long does it take to scan a slide?
I hope you will post more of your old slides.
Posted by: Aydin at September 9, 2008 4:19 PM
Aydin,
The scan itself is virtually instantaneous. The software shows a thumbnail on the monitor in much the same way the viewer in a digital camera shows the image. Acquiring the image takes about two seconds and seems to depend on the slide itself. The carriage holds three slides and is fairly easy to load. I found it fastest to acquire all three slides and then save them as a group to disk. That also takes a few seconds but I couldn't refill the carriage in the time that it takes to save the three images. Of course, fiddling around trying to improve the image takes a long you care to give it. A little over half of the images were quite good as scanned. About 15% were helped significantly with a little work on hue and contrast. In a couple of cases, I found that turning off all enhancement options actually resulted in a better picture. This was true of images that were high contrast, primarily images that had a dark background and a very light (bright) subject. There's a learning curve in this and I'm not at the knee of the curve as yet. And about 10% of the slides were hopeless. But in every one of those cases, the slide itself was hopeless. The remainder were okay but no better than okay and I was unable to improve on them. I do plan to post a few from time to time.
Posted by: Duane at September 9, 2008 4:47 PM
Thanks for the info.
Posted by: Gary Hurd at September 10, 2008 9:43 AM
Do you remember where in relation to tel Gezer that you say the inscription in the picture? I will be there next summer and will be looking around.
Thanks,
Eric
Posted by: Eric at September 11, 2008 11:59 AM
The more I look at it, the more I think it was Reich and Greenhut's inscription number 3, it is at grid reference 1446/1404 about 1250 meters mostly east and a little south of the tell. But Reich and Greenhut say the present location is "unknown, perhaps still on site." It could have been number 4, 1250 meters nearly due east of the tell. In any case, I think it is one of the inscriptions more easterly of the tell, rather than those more to the south of the tell. It is certainly not one of those just below the tell on the north. By time of discovery, it could not have been numbers 8, 9, 11 or 12. Numbers 1, 2, 6, 7, and11 are excluded for various other reasons: extracted from site, only partly extant, etc. Oh, I just noticed that I didn't give the reference for the Reich and Greenhut's paper, so here it is: Reich, Ronny and Zvi Greenhut, "Another 'Boundary or Gezer' Inscription Found Recently," IEJ, 52 (2002), 58-63.
Posted by: Duane at September 11, 2008 3:30 PM
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