Back to the Bulb: The Return of the Slide Show

Since Kodak reintroduced its Ektachrome transparency (slide) in the fall of 2018, lots of people have loaded their cameras and enjoyed capturing bright, bold, and beautiful colors on one of the most colorful films available today. Kodak Ektachrome E100, simply put, is an amazing film. With it's capability of high resolution, low grain, bright but accurate colors, and wide exposure attitude, it's no wonder that photographers can't seen to get enough of the film. Yet, I wonder. How much of this slide film is being seen the way slide film was meant to be seen.

If you have followed this blog or the Uncle Jonesy's Cameras Podcast, you know all about my uncle Jonesy and all the slide film he shot as he documented our family's lives and his travels with my aunt Claire. With his Argus Autronic 1 and later his Minolta SR-T 202, his made hundreds and hundreds of slides of birthdays, family picnics, weddings, holiday gatherings. My brother, Kelley, and would gleefully watch slideshows of these events and enjoy seeing ourselves in the photos. It was on his bright Radiant brand projector screen that we first saw scenes of  New York City, New Orleans, Nassau, and the Wright brothers camp and museum at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. Jonesy and Claire would take us to Rock City Gardens high atop Lookout Mountain only once a year, but Kelley and I could relive the experience as often as we came to visit their house. We would watch tray after tray of slides until we couldn't keep our eyes open.

Then, when I got my first real camera (a Minolta XG-1 with my first teacher paycheck), I followed in Jonesy's footsteps by shooting slide film exclusively. I documented my life, first with my friends, then with my wife, and then with my daughters. Our family would watch slide shows with the same enjoyment and enthusiasm as when I was a child. Over the years I accumulated a closet full of fully loaded Kodak carousel trays that that would illuminate a projector screen with images that documented the lives and travels of me and my family.

When I could no longer get my favorite slide film, Kodachrome, I acquired a digital camera and began documenting life by making jpegs, which were then stored on my computer. My slide projector and screen stayed in the closet, and the small computer screen became our "slide show." No wonder we didn't have many slide shows in the digital era.

So, when Kodak brought back slide film in the form of Ektachrome, I bought some straightway. The resulting scans were awesome, but viewing them on a computer screen could never replace seeing them on a bright projector screen. I wanted see see my Ektachrome slides projected on the big screen just like the old days. However, three problems stood in the way of returning to the slide shows of old.

The first problem was the old projector itself. My Kodak Carousel 750H would no longer advance to the next slide, due to the deterioration of a small plastic tip attached to the solenoid the activates the advancing mechanism, a common problem. The tip can be replaced, but it is not an easy process. I ordered the parts needed, found a good YouTube video, and bravely operated on my "patient." After the reassembly, I tested it and it worked!

Carousel projector repair kit, with parts for the solenoid tip and focus gears.

Before the disassembly. The process is daunting but doable.

The second problem was our move to a small condo, and what to do with two dozen carousel trays that contained the bulk of the hundreds of slides I had shot. Taking them to the condo was not an option, so I had to a) find an efficient way to organize and store them, and b) find a way to project slides without using a carousel. The the second part was solved with the purchase of a Kodak Carousel Stack Loader (plenty to be found on eBay).

Kodak Carousel Stack Loader

This device rests on the top of the projector, feeding it slides from a stack placed in the stack loader. When all of the slides of the stack have been shown, the stack can be returned to its box with all the slides in the same order. Now, I turned my attention to slide storage. After some investigation, I found the perfect solution:  the Adorama 35mm Master Slide Storage Box with Divider Boxes. This sturdy storage box, with its six divider boxes, can store over 2100 slides. Using the supplied divider cards, one can not only store a large number of slide, but also one can organize them into sections according to date, event, place, etc., and design a way of cataloging a slide collection so as to make it possible to find specific slide stacks to project using the stack loader. Once my Adorama 35 Master Slide Storage Box arrived, I began removing slides from carousel trays and storing them in the divider boxes with notated divider cards in-between each section. After notating each divider card, I wrote the same information on the divider box, so that a glance at the box revealed what slides it contained. By the time we moved in late September of 2019, all of the slides that were in the carousel trays were now neatly stored in one master box, and I gave away all of the carousels. 

The Adorama 35mm Master Slide Storage Box with six divider boxes

Notations on the dividers and the divider box tops 

The carousels are gone, but I still have some slides to sort. Remember those yellow boxes?

The third problem was finding a way to mount slides myself. Already I was developing slide film that I was shooting (the process is called E-6, and kits are available online), but now I needed a way to put the transparencies in mounts that would fit in my projector. Once again after some research online, I ordered the AP Promounter II and a box of 100 slide mounts. The AP Promounter II makes mounting slides easy; I can mount an entire roll of film in a few minutes. Then I store the resulting stack of slides in one of the divider boxes until show time.

The AP Promounter II and a box of mounts.

Align the frame line to the arrows, slide the cutter blade, 
and pull out a mounted slide!

Mounted slides:  Little stained glass windows!

Needless to say, being able to see not only all my many old slides but also the new slides I'm making on the big screen is as entertaining as I hoped. Moreover, we have been taking projector, screen, and some divider boxes with us on visits to family for old fashioned slide shows, reliving cherished moments of the past with our children and memories of our travels. There always comes a moment where I have to say, "Ok, this is going to be the last stack," because they always want to see more. And to be honest, so do I. The slide show is back!

Debbie and me, photographed by Uncle Jonesey on our 
first wedding anniversary and now on the big screen.

My family on Easter morning, 1994,
photographed by me with my Minolta X-700
on Kodachrome.