Here, wait, let me focus this thing......
That's better. Can somebody hit the lights?
Does any one here remember slide film? Kodachrome? Ektachrome? Fujichrome? Agfachrome? Those little one by one and a half inch squares were all the rage until digital stuff showed up. We shot slide film and sent it to clients. They had it scanned on drum scanners. They made the images into magazine ads and brochures. It was all so lovely.
But the most fun thing to do with slides was to put them in a slide tray, turn down the room lights, and project them through fantastic optics onto a nice, white screen. Slides were really cool. At ASMP meetings sometimes we'd have everyone pick their ten favorite slides and bring them to a meeting. We'd sit around eating chips and hot sauce, washed down with a beer or two, and watch a slide show of everyone's favorite/show off stuff.
And forget digital projectors, when you tossed 300 watts of light through a Leica projector lens the dynamic range of slides looked amazing. And slides themselves were amazing. They weren't waiting around for added color science, they were color science.
In the early days of my career in photography we used lots of different Kodak Carrousel projectors and lookalike knock-offs of Kodak projectors. They worked just fine most of the time but they were not perfect. Most of the lenses that came with the everyday machines weren't stellar and you could see it mostly on the edges of the projections. But most people had never seen better so we accepted a bit of slop here and there.
One day I sat through a pleasant slide show that seemed crisper, snappier, had more detail and more color richness. At the end of the show I walked back to the rear of the lecture hall and looked at the slide projector. It was a Leitz Pradovit CA 2500. And, just like Wayne Campbell in the movie, "Wayne's World" I found myself saying, "One day it will be mine. Oh yes, it will be mine."
The first Leica projector I bought was a half measure. They made a consumer model called the Pradovit P150 which had a lower output, an overall smaller size and came with a less pricey lens; a Hector 85mm f2.8 P2 which was made by Leica in Germany. The P150 was/is great and worked well. But I still remembered its bigger brother.
Somewhere in the early 1990s, when I felt secured in my career, and bills were getting paid on a regular basis, my local drug camera dealer offered me a deal on a demo Pradovit CA 2500 machine. I couldn't get my credit card out fast enough. For the next handful of years we used that projector for so much stuff. I'd drag it to client presentations, have photographer friends over for group slide shows in the living room and generally made slides the focus of imaging around the house.
Then we moved into our new house and my new office. The projectors got stacked in the office closet and forgotten. We invested in lots of short-lived digital crap. We shared images on computer screens (and they routinely looked like garbage compared to slide projection --- until better monitors and higher res camera options came to market in the last few years) and by 2002 had given up shooting slide film entirely. We still shot medium format transparencies, and Hasselblad made amazing projectors for that film size, but the writing was on the wall and we knew that tossing the cost of a small car at a slide projector for MF would be a waste of money. By 2005 our lives were in a rush and slides were just a memory that still lived a few feet from my desk in a filing cabinet. But no more slide shows. No more gatherings to see sparkling images in dark rooms, surrounded by friends and family, and.... sniff... no popcorn.
Today Belinda and I walked around the neighborhood, hit the big hills, and she talked me off my anxiety ledge about the present economy and the pandemic. She reminded me of the promise I'd made to myself after I spent half a year cleaning out my parent's massively cluttered house: "I'll start clearing out all the stuff I don't need or use as soon as I get back home!" What better time to dig in and delayer the clutter than right now when we are more or less constrained from doing much else?
As I cleaned out stuff from the closet (do I really need tax return documentation from 1987?) I came across not one, but two Leica or Leitz slide projectors. I've cleaned them up and now I'm thinking about having a "one tray" slide show. Just for nostalgia's sake.
Does anyone still use slide projectors? Would anyone have a use for one of these? Do you still project old work? Do your family and friends tolerate slide shows well? Just curious....
Another thought I had was about the Leitz 90mm f2.5 Colorplan CF lens on the professional machine. I wonder if I could adapt it to an L-mount camera? I assume it would be as sharp as a pin and would make a great portrait lens. Has any one had experiences with that kind of conversion?
The CA 2500 weighs a ton, it's built out of Leitz metal so it's well nigh indestructible. There are all kinds of sockets on the back for syncing with sound and doing multi-projector slide shows. It's just amazing. And it's quiet too. I wonder if you could actually make darkroom prints with one.....hmmmm.
I also just remember that we used to use them as hard edged spot lights in the studio. Ah, this is becoming an instantly expanding universe for me...
Feedback? maybe I'm just wasting my time...
24 comments:
People do adapt the slide machine lenses. I’ve seen some shots on Pentax forums done with them Also there is a forum on DP review for adapted lens. Might be more information for you there.
I still have a slide projector (maybe even two) but they are up in the attic. If only I were able to spend some quality spare time at home I might dig them out and give the family a slide show ... :)
However, I don't shoot much slide film now. I shot my last roll of Velvia 50 in 35 mm last year, but I do have several rolls of Velvia in 120 in the freezer (expired 2012). I get through about 1 roll a year.
I shudder to think how many families will be tortured with long, rambling slide shows as a result of this post.
I remember slides.
I remember «multi projector slide shows» where a dozen or so projectors were synched to a musical soundtrack and spilled onto a large screen a riot of images, sometimes combining into a single image, but mostly using contrasting (or matching) content for effect.
I also remember the use of slides at rock concerts to «enhance» the experience.
I used to get excellent results using my Leitz camera lenses retromounted on my enlarger. «If they're good enough to produce lovely negatives, they should be good enough to make equally stunning prints!»
Times change.
Greetings Kirk: One advantage of social distancing is the time to clean up and clear clutter out of the house.
Just discovered an 3M 4000 portable overhead projector deep in a closet - it folds into a little briefcase sized format. Perhaps I can repurpose it as a light table. Otherwise its off to Goodwill.
I recall a study that found Americans had about 300,000 objects in their home on average. I hope to eliminate a few thousand from our properties.
I still have two Kodak Ektagraphic projectors on a shelf in my shed next to an inexpensive 35mm enlarger that I am also not using. I have a ton of slide carousels and yellow boxes filled with slides that I plan on sorting through when I finish cleaning the cellar and the garage. Unfortunately there may be enough time.
Ah, yes, slides. My general rule is that you can have any two of: colour gamut, dynamic range, resolution.
Slides had amazing dynamic range, lovely colour gamut, but the detail was “lacking” to put it politely.
A few years ago I made some large prints for a friend from his slide scans. Never had to sweat over the clean up and the lack of resolution like that.
On the other hand, the content was was quite something, so the rest didn't really matter so much.
Maybe “content” or a similar word should be added to the list above.
PS Firefox doesn't seem to allow access to "comments", even with the malware and adware protection turned off. Found a copy of Internet Explorer that works.
I had a Bell & Howell Slide Cube projector.
"The slide cube projection concept was created by Bell and Howell and they sold these types of projectors through the 1980s … The 35mm slides [were] stored in the clear plastic cubes. Each cube would hold up to 44 of the normal sized 35mm slides.
The storage box would hold 16 of the cubes. If there were 40 slides per cube that would mean that you could store about 640 35mm slides in the same area that you could only get 140 slides in the Kodak Carousel."
https://www.old-photo.com/pages/bell-and-howell-slide-cube-projector.htm
A very sensible machine but it never caught on.
It was common to see people flying to meetings stuffing an armload of carousels into the overhead.
Still projecting (but not shooting) slides! In 2006 I bought a top-of-the-line Ektagraphic projector on eBay for a fraction of what it had cost a few years earlier. I mated it with an equally desirable Navitar wide-angle projection lens some city's water district was selling. I paid more for postage than I did for the lens.
A friend worked for a film and print scanning service where many customers brought in their father's or grandfather's slides to have digitized. Often the slides were still in Kodak, Sawyer or Airequipt magazines. Sadly, when picking up their scans, customers frequently didn't want the trays or even the slides back. Some customers actually brought in the slide projector, too, when they dropped off an order, explaining they didn't want that back either. I routinely left the shop with an armfull of empty Carousel trays whenever I stopped by for lunch with my friend!
I still have a bag full of pair of slides that made 3D photos you could watch via a binocular visor... My father had a crunch for them in the '70. We had a projector that was able to take the pair of them and show just one...
I still have the camera. Sometime I'd like to find a way to scan the slides...
OOOOH!I still have my Leitz projector as well! Slides were vibrant projected. I still kinda miss the old slide shows...it was a real project to get the screen up and the projector positioned just so, and not too close to the audience because the whooosh of the cooling fan would drown out any narration. Viewing images is a lot more relaxed now, but I refuse to take up an entire wall with an 85" LCD just to see slides at the same size as I could back then.
Your comment about projecting slides brings back memories. As the cofounder of a media production company in the early 1970's we produced multi-image programs for a number of Fortune 500 companies, traveling both by commercial as well as corporate jets. The big shows used 15-30 projectors in a two screen overlap mode which permitted movement and animation across the entire area. Screens were usually 10x30 feet and the the shows were usually rear projection. In small ballrooms we had to go with 8x24 CPE's. The programming equipment ran at 100 cues per second which permitted precise timing of images to music or even for fun, lip sync. Oxberry, Marron-Carrell and Magnum Sickles made the animation stands.
AVL and ClearLight produced the programming and dissolve equipment used by most production houses. As for lenses...
yes Leitz lenses were terrific but for commercial purposes and for alignment of the projectors, Kodak 4"-6" zooms were the standard. I still have my own projectors....3 Ektagraphics sitting in a Chief Stand with a ClearLight programming dissolve unit. Lenses.....three critically Matched Schneider 60mm f2.8's. Screen....a CPE 8x12.
My slide projector still gets a lot of use.
Nowadays, mostly just me watching - the kids are too busy with their smartphones to notice! ;)
And I still do the odd film and slide roll in my trusty Nikon F6 - the best film camera I had the luck of owning.
If only someone could come up with a fast scanner that doesn't cost the Earth, I'd still be doing a lot more!
I still have a Kodak Ektagraphic projector and slides in carousels. Time to set it up and run through a few trays. I would love to see them through a Leitz projector, it sounds like an amazingly enveloping experience. Never could afford one back in the day. I think Im still trying to get that same feeling and experience from digital photography. Getting back the slides from the lab, loading a tray, dimming the lights and sitting back to watch the magic was a special experience just not repeated by a backlit screen.
Still got my old Hanimex slide projector and a bunch of 'Rondex' slide mags filled with old family photos from the late 70s/early 80s. Though I've not bothered projecting them for years as at the time I could only afford cheap slide film and a lot of it has got some kind of galloping slide rot. Scanned the better ones a few years ago.
Towards the end of the Kodachrome years I shot a few rolls for old times' sake and scanned those too. Got a few rolls of the new Ektachrome in the fridge but who knows when I'm liable to use those this year?
Traditionally, every slide show must include at least a few which are show back to front or upside down!
Coincidentally I've started my own (ruthless) lockdown cleanup, and just threw out my P150. I hadn't used it for about 18 years. I always had trouble folding up XPan frames to fit inside it...
I'm certain that had I powered it up the bulb would have blown... and then I'd go down THAT eBay rabbit hole.
I still have my Rollei slide projector. I suppose I should chuck it, but ,,,,, However I did toss a Kodak Carousel projector. Only because I have a hate-on for Kodak. I just finished scanning a select number of my fathers Kodachromes dating back to the early 50's if not before. Now that was depressing!
I might try taking the lens out of the Rollei and see what it would create as a taking lens. Can't miss an opportunity to be kitschy now can I!
Eric
Your Pradovit is the best 35mm projector ever made, with the later CA2502 and the original Color 250. There was even a Super-Colorplan that was apochromatic. A slide projector like this separates the men from the boys. Must get mine (2502) out and give it a run. Love a slide show.
Hi Kirk,
Thanks for your article. It encouraged me to buy the same model of projector you wrote about. It was advertised as being fully working and pictures showing its condition looked good. Expected arrival is about a week and a half out, here’s hoping it is as advertised.
I have a number of old slides around, and my mother has hundreds from the old days. We used to beg my father to set up the screen and projector to see the slides when I was young, good memories there.
As we get older, good memories are certainly something that is good to relive, so thanks. Jeff Smith
To this day I consider color slides my preferred medium and wish I could afford to shoot them for any work that's important to me. Unfortunately, economics prevail. I calculated what it would have cost to have photographed my most recent book Backroads and Byways of Georgia on slide film, and it would have been about $2000, even if I had done the processing myself. (I still have my Unicolor Film Drum and motor base in the basement.) $2000 is just too big a slice out of an advance that also has to cover travel, food, and lodging -- I drove 11,000 miles for the project.
And of course, there would have been many, many hours of scanning.
But I do believe I was a better, more precise photographer in the 35 years I shot slides. Most exposures were read with an incident meter and carefully bracketed.
In 1972 I went to work for a company that created filmstrips, short motion pictures (what used to be called "Industrial films"), and later, multi-image productions, for training, sales, and public relations purposes. I worked for them for five years, then later went on my own doing the same things.
It all ended in the early '90s, though, as video hit the audio-visual business like a flash flood, almost completely wiping out every other medium. I landed hard. 1991 was the worst year of my career. I tried doing video myself, did a few productions, and hated it. At that point I began to re-iinvent myself as a commercial photographer, but I was never as good at it, or as successful as I was as an audio-visual producer.
I'm close to the end of my career now, but I dearly miss those days.
I have two of the 'carousel' tray Pradolux RT-300 II projectors with the Leitz 90mm f2.5 Colorplan CF. The CF was for 'curved field' to project non-glass mounted slides after they had 'popped' into a slight curve from the heat of the projector lamp. The RT-300 had a vent that pre-heated the slides in the carousel to pop before they were in the gate to project. It also used a 45 degree mirror to reflect the light from the lamp 90 degrees into the slide path. That mirror passed IR wavelengths without reflecting them so the slides were less susceptible to fading from the IR and heat while being projected. The RT-300 was made for Leitz by Singer.
In the early 80's I attended a slideshow for photographers in Minneapolis with the slides projected from a Pradovit. The slides were Kodachrome shot wth Leica SLR cameras. Someone asked the presenter which polarizer he used to get the colors so saturated. The answer was that the slides were shot with no polarizer, but the photographer was considering getting a B+W circular polarizer needed to work with the spot metering mode of the cameras.
In 1982 I saw a slideshow at Photokina using multiple stacked, aligned, and synchronized Hasselblad projectors; six if I recall correctly. Now that was a slideshow.
Lee
I still have my Ektagraphic 5600 sitting on the shelf in my office. The last time I gave a public presentation was in 2009. I was showing slides shot on Fuji Provia. I also showed a few digital images using a laptop and digital projector. The difference in quality and brightness was clearly in favor of the slide projector.
DavidB
I had one of those Bell & Howell cube projectors mentioned earlier by typetalker. It worked well enough, I suppose - but it was quite noisy, and it could not be used to go back beyond 2 or three slides, or run a set of slides on a continuous loop. I later acquired one of the Kodak Carousel projectors. The carousel was definitely bulkier than the two or three Bell & Howell cubes that would have contained the same number of slides. But the projector seemed to be better built overall, and was much quieter. I would have loved to use one of your Leica projectors back in the day.
If you no longer feel the need to keep both projectors then perhaps one of your local educational institutions with a photography program would be interested in one of those projectors as a donation. (When it re-opens, of course.) I would not doubt that slide film is being used by students at the insistence of some instructors. (Super 8 movie film supposedly re-emerged thanks to film schools wanting students to have some experience with editing and splicing together actual film stock.)
Thanks for this trip down memory lane.
Despite my wife's best efforts, I have held on to my Ektagraphic, though I cannot remember when I last projected a slide. Not having a darkroom for most of my young life, I learned to shoot on slide film. As has been noted, you learned exposure discipline shooting Kodachrome. I have Kodachrome going back to the early 1960s that I shot as a kid. It still looks good. I finally sent all my slides (and color negs) to an Indian scanning company so I could integrate them into my digital archives. It was about 16k images, spanning about 40 years from high school through the kids growing up. Quite a trip down memory lane to when I loaded the DVDs into Lightroom and rolled through them. I also had them scan a few hundred family photos going back to the early 1900s. Using Shutterfly, I was able to build some memory books for my mother before she passed on and I will do the same for my grandkids for when they are older.
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