Syd Curtis wrote:
>
> I know this is not what naturerecordists is about, but I crave your
> indulgence, arguing that photography is a way of recording nature, and
> knowing that Naturerecordists collectively represent a wonderfully wide b=
ody
> of knowledge and experience.
>
> My mother was an excellent nature photographer within the limits of the
> technology of the day - circa 80 years ago: Thornton-Pickard half-plate
> camera and B/W glass plates. Had photo-essays published in the local
> "Queenslander" newspaper; made it into a recent Queensland Museum book
> "Their Brilliant Careers" - being biographies of naturalists of note, not
> generally celebrated in their day because they were women.
>
> I have some hundreds of these glass plates. Mother developed them hersel=
f,
> as she considered that locally-available commercial firms didn't wash the=
m
> properly, thus jeopardising their permanence.
>
> Can anyone advise me please, whether there exists a scanner that would sc=
an
> these into a computer (Mac G3 - OS 9.1) and allow them to be printed as
> positives.
Most any scanner could do this, you do need to space the plates slightly
away from the plate of the scanner to avoid interference patterns. The
thickness of something like mylar drafting film around the edges of the
plates should be plenty. Emulsion side should be toward the scanner's plate=
.
You'd want to do it at pretty high resolution to recover all the
resolution in the negatives. The higher the optical resolution of the
scanner the better. I doubt you could find a film scanner that takes
glass plates.
Photoshop would be the best software. Inverting the image will give you
a positive, though you will probably have to adjust things a bit.
That's the basics, though with such valuable plates you might want to
see if there is a local expert in the process.
Walt
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