Taping it down
Many years ago, I published a process for mounting film chips in slide mounts. It involved a lot of fiddling with temporary bits of tape, and scraps of plastic to protect the film from fingerprints. I’ve replaced all of that by using a long, thin piece of clear plastic to help me manipulate the film.
Mounting your slides for viewing can be time consuming. When I’m working through a roll of uncut film, I’ll preview the images by cross-eye viewing. The detail isn’t great, but this can give me an idea of which images are worth investing the time required for a precision mount.
Sometimes, however, I want to see the image in a viewer before making my decision. In these cases, I follow a tip from Paul Talbot. I reach for one of my protective sleeves, slip my cut & reversed film chips in, and drop it into my viewer. The images aren’t precisely aligned, but they are often close enough. This technique also lets me try different mount apertures by holding them in front of the image.
As part of my continuing tinkering, I have provided an external power jack on one of my TL120 cameras. The full story gets its own page.
The camera can now accept power from any external battery which can deliver between 5 and 32 volts. Long exposures and cold temperatures are no longer things to be afraid of. I’m planning on using a 12v lithium from a cordless drill. It should be able to deliver the goods even when the temperatures fall below freezing.
Over the years, there have been many comments on the mailing lists about the batteries in the TL120 camera. Over the years, I have measured and offered suggestions about these concerns. I have recently done more measurements and collected my information onto a single page.
Summary: The button cells used in the TL120 are not a very good match for its requirements. But since the camera is designed to use them,
Almost on a whim, I decided to look and see what was inside my TL120 camera. 
And since I was going in, it seemed like a good idea to take pictures and document it for the next person.
You can get your camera, a pair of tweezers, a couple of screwdrivers, and follow along!
There are a lot of pictures and process takes a lot of space to describe, so it gets its own page.
Stereo slide viewers can mean different things to different people. Each of us has a different set of “must have” features. Some commonly mentioned features are:
Different people value different features. No single viewer is going to make everyone happy.
There are those who strive to realistically recreate the the scene the camera saw at the time the image was made. I have, however, long been intrigued by wide-angle viewing regardless of the focal length of the lenses on the camera. I’ve wanted to get closer to the image and become part of it. more…
I’ve been after a way to present printed stereo images. The MirScope is a beautiful device and books from AdroamaPix seem to be a decent way to make content for it. I did a sample book to see how well it would work.
The book wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t terrific, either. I solicited some comments and suggestions and made some edits to it. The edited book was never printed. It was just an on-line evaluation tool.
There are many devices to assist viewing large print and screen images. I’ve tried a few, though certainly not all. I’ve just been working with a Wheatsone viewer from Mark Golebiowski who is selling them in kit form at www.fullscreenviewer.com
I had the opportunity to try this viewer at the 2010 NSA convention in Ohio. It felt nice in my hands, was easy to use and worked well with very large prints. When the opportunity came along to exhibit a couple of my own images, I knew I wanted to use this viewer. more…
For those of us who shoot medium format slides, viewing the work of others involves either transporting the images or the people. I look after a couple of traveling folios of MF3D images. They circle through North America a couple times a year bringing immersive stereo images to people’s mailboxes.
50x50 and 50x40 mounts
What good is an image if you can’t view it?
How can you view your image if you can’t mount it?
There are several mounts from which to choose. How are they simmilar and how do they differ?
I’ve gathered some information on the multiple mounts available for medium format stereo slides.
