Do you live and work in a completely dust-free place? Neither do I. Dust is a photographer’s worst enemy, as is a bad job at the processor’s shop. I used to get all my slides scanned at E.B. Luce in Worcester, MA. They did a great job, but around the time I left Worcester I also stopped shooting film. I have not been back but I do recommend them if you need some work done, no matter where you live.
As I was scanning my slides a while back, I noticed that E.B. Luce had boogered up one of my slide mounts. This picture of Wat Suthat in Bangkok, Thailand, while it looked great through a projector, did not look so great as a digital image:
Notice the black bar along the top on the right side. The film had been mounted crooked in the frame. That’s an easy mistake to make and also an easy one to fix, but I was not in the mood. I simply opened my copy of Photoshop and took care of it with the cloning tool:
A five-minute investment of time with some software made it look fine and kept me from having to open the slide mount, reseat the film, rescan it and still probably do something to tweak it in Photoshop.
Another common problem is dust. At first I did not notice it, but there is a little speck of dust above and to the left of the spire of the main chedi at Wat Phrathat Doi Suthep in Chiang Mai:
I hoped it might be a bird high in the sky but upon further investigation it did turn out to be dust. Even if it were a bird, it would be a distraction in the blue sky and would be a good candidate for getting cropped out. Again, I used the cloning tool to fix it:
Remember tips like this. Often we cannot easily go back to a place and reshoot the scene, especially if pictures are of an event or travel location but often, if we are creative enough, we can figure out a way to salvage the image. When was I going to get back to Thailand to take photos of Buddhist temples again? Well, maybe that’s not the best example, but the point stands. The cloning tool is just one of many weapons in the photographer’s arsenal. We will look at others in future posts.
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