Project: preserve a late nature photographer's life work by creating a digital nature photography bank. Give the photos a new life by publishing them online.
Details: an archive of ca. 20 000 photos (mostly slide positives, 1970s-2000s) needed to be organized by taxonomy and theme. 5000 cleaned, framed, tagged, metadata collected and attached (name, location, date, etc. where available). Each photograph was adjusted individually for color and then scanned in 2 passes: both with and without IR dust removal.
Equipment used: Nikon Super COOLSCAN 5000 ED with VueScan, Adobe Bridge for metadata management, Photoshop for touching up and final color adjustment.
Result: 1000+ photos color graded and published in a blog over several years. Photos donated to several publications such as books, flyers and websites.
Future plans: Release the main corpus of the scanned work under a suitable CC license to Wikimedia.
Photos below: Jouko Veikkolainen. The scans contain varying levels of dirt and scratches present on the original slide photos - even after careful manual cleaning. Scanning with an infra red dust removal pass takes care most of these easy-peasy, otherwise some digital clean up is necessary.
