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Posting Old Converted Travel Pictures

February 17th, 2009 Posted in Cheap Asia Travel, General, Travel adventures

This shows I’m no recent college graduate: when I first backpacked around the world and was shooting photos for articles, I had to pack slide film and then mail the developed slides to the editor. A royal pain as you can imagine if you are trekking through the mountains far away from a city.

So a while back I received a slide converter contraption as a gift that allows you to convert these old relics to digital form. The only problem is, you get what you pay for. It’s the type you see in gadget catalogs and the SkyMall magazine and probably has a 60 percent profit margin. If you tweak the digital images enough after they come out you can get something reasonably approximating what you shot, but they look kind of dreamlike no matter what.

But when I stumbled upon this Slide photo show thingy, and their drive-in movie skin, I realized I had found the right muse for these strange looking shots. Here I present five decade-old, otherwordly photos from the Himalayas of India and Nepal. Lean your seat back and enjoy.

  1. 7 Responses to “Posting Old Converted Travel Pictures”

  2. By jean on Feb 18, 2009

    Quite cool! From “a royal pain” to “something reasonably approximating” and “the right muse”, how the technology develops in our world. :)

  3. By Carl Parkes on Feb 18, 2009

    Did you shoot on Kodachrome? I’ve got 10,000 Kodachrome shots of Asia from my 1979 trip to Asia, and can never figure out what to do with them.

  4. By tim on Feb 19, 2009

    Can’t remember if they were Kodachrome or Ektachrome, but something like that. A few really choice ones I took to a lab and had them blow up to large prints, but the ratio of dollars spent to what came out was pretty lousy. I’ve got boxes of them…

  5. By Lanora on Feb 22, 2009

    I too have tons of slides, mine mostly Fuji (liked the saturation) and from my year in France in the mid-80s.

    They cost a bundle to develop, didn’t they!

    I’m inspired to dig mine out again. Thanks for sharing, Tim!

  6. By Joseph on Feb 23, 2009

    PLEASE refrain from forcing me to listen to loud crappy music when i come to your awesome site. Thanks.

  7. By tim on Feb 24, 2009

    Sorry Joseph, and everyone else. I always surf with my speakers off unless I’m on a video site because of this very problem. I never even knew it was playing something automatically. I’ve tweaked the settings so it should be a silent movie now!

  8. By Joseph on Feb 24, 2009

    Awesome. *Much* better. Thanks!!

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