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Evaluating Photos
Your pictures will mostly look gorgeous because slides can hold at
least twice as much contrast as prints. You will pat yourself on the
back for being a photographic genius.
The first thing you need is a color corrected light table. Don't waste
your time trying to build your own. For one thing, the appropriate
fluorescent tubes are plenty expensive so you might as well have a
decent box to put them in.
Everyone says the Macbeth Prooflite, the JUST, and the Kaiser boxes are the
best, but I can't find anything wrong with the Acculights, which are less than
half the price ($160 for a 14x24" box). I've had one in my home studio for 10
years and it still works great. B&H sells these by the truckload.
Set a slide-saver page (I like the Beseler polypropylene ones myself) down on
the light table and start stuffing it with mounted 35mm slides. Use a Sharpie
super fine point pen to mark the top of the plastic page with a roll ID. Note
briefly which are decent pictures but basically behave like a robot.
Once you've got all your rolls organized into slidesaver
pages, put them back down on the light table
and look at the good pictures with a loupe. A very
good loupe. With the money you saved on the lightbox, you can afford the
best: a Schneider. Get the 4X for viewing 35mm full-frame ($110, comes in
several exciting colors now). When you see the sharpness and color saturation
of your images through the Schneider loupe, you will quit your day job. Too
bad your photograph will never ever look this good as a Cibachrome, on a
magazine page, or on a Web page.
[There are other loupes worth having. If you make 6x6cm images, you will
love the Schneider 6x6 magnifier ($215), which can also be used with 35mm
images almost as effectively as the 4x. You might also want a high
magnification loupe for deciding whether something is sharp enough and/or too grainy. PEAKs are
cheap but I'm not convinced that they are useful. Schneider makes a 10X ($231) loupe that is probably
excellent but I haven't tried it.
A lot of people from Rodenstock to Hoya make imitations of the Schneider 4X loupe. They aren't much
cheaper and I don't think they are worth the hassle of investigating.]
Use the Sharpie to mark the really good pictures or put a Post-It at the top of the page with the
worthwhile frame numbers noted.
http://www.photo.net/photo/evaluation (2 of 17)7/3/2005 2:19:24 AM